Showing posts with label spring 2010. Show all posts
Showing posts with label spring 2010. Show all posts

Thursday, March 4, 2010

basketball and marriage premium

I've always been interested in basketball the most among professional sports though I haven't played it seriously in my life. This semester I've tried taking a PE course but couldn't fit it into my schedule and ended up taking tennis, which I thought might be a better idea in any way.

But finally, I think I am seriously getting a step further into the world of basketball through a different channel - economics. Well, I've never imagined myself doing any analysis with sport statistics. Even when Professor Wang was giving out some fascinating statistical analysis with baseball data in his uniquely entertaining way, I was never drawn to regard sports as a subject of my statistical analysis.

This semester, however, I think I am going to write a long, in-depth paper using sport statistics on NBA players. I will mainly investigate whether there exists a marriage premium on the productivity of NBA players. Does marriage enhance a player's game performance (measured by scores per game divided by the number of attempts at goals)?

I am still at a very much beginning step to predict anything. But I'm hoping to see some positive effect of marriage on productivity to provide a more interesting result and convince myself there has got to be some reason other than the fact that marriage is a social norm if almost everyone gets married at least once in their life.

I'm excited for this project - it'd be fun - except that I'd have to devote so many nights and days, including my spring break, to struggle to find a good instrument, deal with Stata, and justify my methodology. Agh!