Date of Award

6-2011

Document Type

Open Access

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Economics

First Advisor

Stephen Schmidt

Language

English

Keywords

shirking, hockey, sports, team, salary, contract

Abstract

Shirking has been examined in baseball and basketball, but never hockey. If Shirking is found to be evident in hockey, then management should give players shorter contracts and should pay a discount price if a long‐term contract is given. The dependent variable for this study is shirking. There are many different independent variables and they are all different measures of performance (except for dummy variables for team and position). Most studies of hockey have minimal measures of performance, which are usually offensive statistics, but I will include defensive statistics as well. The sample for the study is players who participated in the 2007‐08 and 2008‐09 NHL seasons. These players also had to be under a contract that saw them make more than $500,000 during the 2008‐09 campaign. The salary data was compiled from NHLnumbers.com while the statistical data was taken from NHL.com. I am running a five stage regression analysis to test my shirking hypothesis. One possible measurement problem is that there is only data from two seasons, but there are still over 550 players tested. Shirking was not found in the NHL. The more years remaining on a player’s contract does not decrease performance. However, a player’s performance decreases as their likelihood of retirement at the end of their current contract increases. I will refer to the former traditional shirking because that is what most of the literature examines when testing for shirking. I will refer to the latter as non‐traditional shirking.

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