Basketball Player´s Performance and Income: A Research

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Everyday there are more and more measures of player performance in every sport; and basketball is not an exception. Players’ actions are continuously observed in the attempt to break down in pieces the huge complexity of the game.

The purpose of the research will be to investigate the relationship between NBA salaries, the dependent variable, and a set of performance measures as independent variables: point scored per game, assists, steals, fouls, rebounds, years as a pro in the NBA, turnovers.

This study will inspect if and how the different independent variables contribute to the salary of the players, allowing us to determine which variables influence the pay most and which influence it less, in both a positive and a negative way.

The work is intended to provide a useful insight to better understand how players’ performances on the court impact on their income.

Literature review

For many years economists have been studying trying to understand the main components in salary determination in different professional sports.

For many years economists have examined and refined the understanding of salary determination in professional sports in various prospective

Our story starts with a review of the lessons the current body of literature teaches us about the economics of professional basketball.

Discrimination

Economists have become increasingly interested in the topic of discrimination in professional sports; and basketball is not an exception. The widely spread perception of the public has been that sports are an oasis of equal economic opportunities for minorities. This belief is strengthened by the fact that minority representation is higher in many major sports teams than in the labor force as a whole....

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...gated the relationship between wages and team success in a variety of sports, including the NBA. Although this relationship has been found to be statistically significant, only 16% of winning percentage was explained by relative payroll. A similar result was reported by Berri, Schmidt and Brooks (2004), after having analyzed payroll in the NBA across fifteen seasons they ended up with the result that relative payroll only explains 10% of the team wins.

Studies regarding individual player’s performance and player’s salary have differed mainly on the choice of which variable to include in the model. Each author proposes his own formula to better capture and explain the variability of

Another vector of studies that has found in the NBA a fertile ground of research has been that exploring the relationship occurring between pay inequality and worker performance.

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