An Empirical Analysis of the daily Labor supply of Stadium Venors

Abstract

This paper analyzes the daily labor supply behavior of food and beverage vendors at a single stadium over an entire baseball season. This labor market is attractive for the study of labor supply both because ofvendors unilateraly decide whether to participate on each game date and because canges in product demand conditions across days are large and highly predictable, generating exogenous game‐to‐game variation in the vendor “Wage.” I exploit the observable shift in product demand conditions across games to esumate the labor supply (participation) elasticity of stadium vendors. Estimates that recognize that demand conditions and vendor labor supply decisions simultancously determine the venofdor wage always find substantial labor supply elasticities, typically in the 55.65 range. In contract, estimates that ignore the endoreneity of the ties. These results highlight the imporatance of using demand shift markets.