Faculty Publications

An Inquiry Into The Pay Structure Of The New York Yankees: 1919-1941

Document Type

Article

Keywords

earnings, human capital, monopsony, New York Yankees

Journal/Book/Conference Title

Eastern Economic Journal

Volume

38

Issue

4

First Page

449

Last Page

459

Abstract

This paper explores salaries for New York Yankees players during the early 20th century. Thanks to the recent availability of a unique data set, we are able to construct detailed earnings profiles using individual player salaries. Human capital wage estimates suggest that the Yankees owners rewarded players on the basis of their contributions to team productivity. Although apparently exploiting their monopsony power, the Yankees management set salaries on a systematic, productivity-related, basis. Because of the panel nature of the data, we use fixed-effects regression instead of Ordinary Least Squares regression estimation. © 2012 EEA 0094-5056/12.

Department

Department of Economics

Original Publication Date

9-1-2012

DOI of published version

10.1057/eej.2011.23

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