Major-League Baseball Player Salaries by Year, 1880-1919

Name	File Type	Size	Last Modified
RivalLgs1880_1919.dta	application/x-stata	576.5 KB	01/03/2017 11:28:AM

Project Citation:

Bradbury, John Charles. Major-League Baseball Player Salaries by Year, 1880-1919. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2017-01-03. https://doi.org/10.3886/E100390V1

Project Description

Summary: During the early days of professional baseball, the dominant major leagues imposed a “reserve clause” designed to limit player wages by restricting competition for labor. Entry into the market by rival leagues challenged the incumbent monopsony cartel’s ability to restrict compensation. Using a sample of player salaries from the first 40 years of the reserve clause (1880-1919), this study examines the impact of inter-league competition on player wages. This study finds a positive salary effect associated with rival league entry that is consistent with monopsony wage suppression, but the effect is stronger during the 20th century than the 19th century. Changes in levels of market saturation and minor-league competition may explain differences in the effects between the two eras.

Scope of Project

Subject Terms: monopsony; competition; baseball; compensation; sports leagues

Time Period(s): 1/1/1880 – 12/31/1919

Collection Date(s): 8/1/2015 – 8/24/2016

Universe: Major-league baseball players with recorded salaries.

Data Type(s): event/transaction data

Collection Notes: Salary data for replication purposes only, and shared with permission of Sports Reference LLC. As a requirement for using the data, cite Sports Reference LLC, Baseball-Reference.com as the source. Contact information is available at http://www.baseball-reference.com/about/contact.shtml.

Methodology

Data Source: The salary data was complied by the late Doug Papas, Michael Haupert, and the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), which maintains the database. A description of the available data is available at http://www.baseball-reference.com/about/salary.shtml. Player data generated from the Lahman Baseball Database (http://www.seanlahman.com/baseball-archive/statistics/).

Unit(s) of Observation: Baseball players by year

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Published Versions

V1 [2017-01-03]

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