Oral Presentations - Session 1A: UC 326
NCAA Enforcement and its Impact on College Football Winning Percentage
Presentation Type
Presentation
Abstract / Artist's Statement
The NCAA (or National Collegiate Athletic Association) regulates college sports in the United States. Due to its regulation of input costs (through scholarship and recruiting limits) and output, it is widely regarded as a cartel amongst economists. Although several authors have studied the NCAA as a reference to cartel behavior, very few (if any) have analyzed the impact of NCAA enforcement on the teams it oversees. In any cartel, there is an incentive to cheat on rules put in place to gain market share from other members of the cartel. The NCAA is no different, as each team could easily pay student athletes beyond the scholarship limit, gain better athletes, and win more games. It is up to the NCAA to discourage this behavior through punishments for teams caught cheating. To gain a further understanding of cartel behavior, it is important to ask whether these punishments are effective in deterring the cheaters. I plan on statistically analyzing the impact of NCAA punishments on college football teams' winning percentages using a difference in difference regression model. I will be able to estimate the impact of NCAA enforcement on a team's winning percentage and extrapolate this into whether or not the NCAA is effectively punishing teams who break the rules.
Category
Social Sciences
NCAA Enforcement and its Impact on College Football Winning Percentage
UC 326
The NCAA (or National Collegiate Athletic Association) regulates college sports in the United States. Due to its regulation of input costs (through scholarship and recruiting limits) and output, it is widely regarded as a cartel amongst economists. Although several authors have studied the NCAA as a reference to cartel behavior, very few (if any) have analyzed the impact of NCAA enforcement on the teams it oversees. In any cartel, there is an incentive to cheat on rules put in place to gain market share from other members of the cartel. The NCAA is no different, as each team could easily pay student athletes beyond the scholarship limit, gain better athletes, and win more games. It is up to the NCAA to discourage this behavior through punishments for teams caught cheating. To gain a further understanding of cartel behavior, it is important to ask whether these punishments are effective in deterring the cheaters. I plan on statistically analyzing the impact of NCAA punishments on college football teams' winning percentages using a difference in difference regression model. I will be able to estimate the impact of NCAA enforcement on a team's winning percentage and extrapolate this into whether or not the NCAA is effectively punishing teams who break the rules.