Discrimination in Employment Retention: Lost Career Earnings in the NFL | WIP Seminar with Ian Gregory-Smith

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This co-authored paper examines the role that racial discrimination plays in the career earnings of professional American football players. For the first four years of a player’s career they are under a restricted ‘rookie’ contract before the player becomes a free agent “veteran”. Players who survive in the league to free agency typically receive a large uptick in their remuneration upon signing their veteran contract. Consequently, marginal decisions over employment retention during the rookie contract have large implications for total earnings realised over a player’s careers. This paper reports differences in survival and career earnings between Black and White players that are not accounted for by player productivity.

Dr Ian Gregory-Smith is a Reader in Economics at Newcastle University Business School since September 2022. He is an applied microeconomist. He has worked in the fields of Labour Economics, Industrial Organisation, Finance, Corporate Governance, Management and Sports Economics. He previously worked in the Department of Economics at the University of Sheffield from 2012-2022 and the University of Edinburgh 2010-2012. His undergradute and postgradute studies were at the University of Nottingham, graduating with a PhD in 2009. Prior to being an academic, he worked in the private sector for 2 years for Manifest Information Services Ltd (now Minerva Analytics), who provide research and voting services for institutional investors. 

Our CIRHR Work-In-Progress Seminar series allows members of our community to discuss early-stage research. Future guest speakers include:

• Topic TBD
  November 29, Alejandra González Jiménez, CIRHR Assistant Professor