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Posted 8-6-99
The National Basketball Association has long been known as a pioneer in racial equality. The overwhelming majority of its players are black, as are its top-paid players. According to a new study, however, fans still demonstrate a preference for white players, which leads to shorter careers for black players and significant loss in earnings compared to whites.
The study, "The NBA, Exit Discrimination, and Career Earnings," was authored by Ha Hoang, assistant professor of management policy at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University; and Dan Rascher, a senior consultant with Navigante Consulting Inc. in Emeryville, California, and adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco.
The authors look at a wide range of performance data, such as scoring, assists, steals, rebounding, and blocked shots, as well as career lengths, for players during the years 1980-91. The players examined were drafted in the period 1980-86. The study finds evidence of exit discrimination, which the authors define as "involuntary dismissal based on the preferences of employers, coworkers or customers."
In the NBA, exit discrimination takes the form of black players being cut more often than white players with similar performance statistics. The expected career length of a black player over the period studied was 5.5 years, versus 7.5 years for a white player. In dollar terms, the shortened playing careers translates into an average of $808,000 in lost wages for black players.
By contrast, the authors point out that as a result of wage discrimination in the NBA, the typical player who is white will earn approximately $329,000 more than the same player who is black up to the end of the black player's career.
To try to find the causes of exit discrimination, the authors compare the racial composition of NBA teams with the metropolitan areas where they play. They find a "significant, positive relationship between the percentage of citizens who are white and the percentage of players who are white in a given city," and the "the closer the match between team racial composition and city racial composition, the higher the stadium attendance."
Because there appears to be a fan preference for seeing white players, the authors hypothesize that white players are less likely to be cut than their black counterparts. Further bolstering their hypothesis, the authors find that the race of the coach and general manager do not affect the racial composition of the team.
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