A socioeconomic analysis of professional hockey salaries

Abstract

Since the work of Simon Rottenberg [JPE, 1956], economists continue to write analyses of the labor market for professional athletes, contributing a series of socioeconomic studies of salaries for professional sports players. Hockey is the latest, with its own particular characteristics. It is a sport split between Canada and the U.S. with the predominance of Canadian players diminishing. Earlier work on minorities in this sport focused on Franco-phonic players and no significant other minority was defined and analyzed. We found that a significant part of the variation in professional hockey salaries could be accounted for by experience and draft choice. The extreme scarcity of African-American and African players provides little confidence in our finding of no discrimination against these seven or so players. There was no confirmation of the weak result of bias against Franco-phonic athletes as found elsewhere. Certain cities paid their players less, as was shown by dummy variable analysis. These results could be supplemented by the more standard decomposition into positions and consequent skills application. Another possible extension of this work would be to use a Scully-Medoff model to check for exploitation.