Economic Rockstar

Connecting Brilliant Minds in Economics and Finance

103: Brian Mills on the Labor Market in Baseball, the Umpire Strikes Back and R

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103: Brian Mills on the Labor Market in Baseball, the Umpire Strikes Back and R

Brian Mills is an Assistant Professor at the University of Florida within the Department of Tourism, brian-mills-economic-rockstarRecreation, and Sport Management specializing in Managerial Sports Economics.

Professor Mills is also Associate Research Faculty within the Eric Friedheim Tourism Institute (EFTI).

Brian’s research interests encompass topics such as the sports labor market, industrial organization and sports league policy, public policy and economic development related to sport, and advanced analytics in the sports business. He is especially interested in applying economic lessons and quantitative analysis to problems that sport managers face in their everyday decision making.

Dr. Mills has also worked on consulting projects for professional sports teams and municipalities both in the U.S. and Canada.

Before arriving at Florida, Brian received his PhD and MA in Sport Management from the University of Michigan.  During that time, he also completed MA degrees in Statistics and in Applied Economics.  Brian earned his BA in Psychology in 2006 from St. Mary’s College of Maryland where he played NCAA Division III baseball.

Brian’s work and research interests can be found at brianmmills.com and at princeofslides.blogspot

Brian is now offering a new course called Exploring Pitch Data with R over at www.datacamp.com.

Check it out. You’ll have lots of fun learning basic data manipulation, summarization, and visualization in R using Statcast data.

Economics:

In this episode, Brian discusses and mentions: sports economics, labor market, externalities, incentives, wages, allocation of time, R, population, GDP and incomes.

Economists:

In this episode, Brian discusses and mentions: Rodney Fort, Stefan Szymanski, Lawrence Kahn and Bill Gerrard.

Links:

Brian Mills’ Writing Tips:

  1. Always be reading and writing.
  2. Give or receive feedback and re-write.
  3. Develop a habit of note-taking.
  4. Turn your idea into a good story.

Resources:

Artilces:

Scoring in Baseball Is Down. Blame the Umpires: A Study Found That Umpires Have Expanded Their Strike Zone in Recent Years in The Wall Street Journal

Books:

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008: Robbie Butler on Using Sports to Teach Entry-Level Economics

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008: Robbie Butler on Using Sports to Teach Entry-Level Economics

Robbie Butler is a lecturer of economics at University College Cork in Ireland. He combines his love of sports with economics to explain many economic concepts. He lectures on a multitude of modules, such as Microeconomics, Macroeconomics, Growth Economics and Corporate Strategy.  Robbie received his PhD from University of Hertfordshire in England, is published in a number of internationally renowned academic journals and is a regular economics contributor on media. Robbie’s primary passion is in sports, namely football (soccer) and he has a Junior International cap for Ireland. Robbie managed to bridge his passion for sports with his career in economics and, along with his brother David and other colleagues, created and runs the popular website www.sportseconomics.org.

Economic Themes:

In this interview, Robbie mentions and discusses: economic growth, institutional economics, the logic of collective action in society, the rise and decline of nations, sports economics, theory of Multiple Intelligence, incentives, game theory, the volunteers dilemma, decision-making, competition, government funding, laissez-faire and sabermetrics.

Economists and Economic Schools:

In this interview, Robbie mentions: Professor Geoffrey Hodgeson, Mancur Olson, David Kahneman, Stefan Szymanski, Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, Jadrian Wooten, Rodney Fort, Brad Humphreys, Seamus Coffey, John Considine, David, Butler, Declan Jordan and John Eakins.

Robbie’s Influencers:

His PhD supervisor/mentor Professor Geoffrey Hodgeson who recently established the World Institutional Network for Interdisciplinary Research (WINIR), the works of Mancur Olson, Stefan Szymanski, Rodney Fort and Brad Humphreys.

Find Out:

  • who lectured Robbie as an undergrad. Hint: He’s the host of this show!
  • how Robbie’s use of sports in explaining economics grew from fun and a personal interest into something that has grown and evolved into something quite serious.
  • how playing football at a highly competitive level has allowed Robbie view economics in quite a unique way.
  • how this unique view has given Robbie an ability to delve into economics with many sports analogies and examples in which students can relate.
  • how having played sports competitively has given Robbie a level of respect and credibility when using sports-related themes in economics.
  • the importance of working with like-minded people and how it makes life so much easier.
  • why a coffee break with colleagues can have the most intellectually-stimulating conversations bursting with ideas.
  • a great tip before publishing a blog post when working with others who share the same website – it cuts out the use of Google Docs, Dropbox, etc.
  • how working with a sibling makes the feedback on your work more critical and raw – something that could help with perfecting the right article.
  • about the Theory of Multiple Intelligence by  Harvard educationalist Howard Gardner – we have 8 ways of learning.
  • how sports can be used as “a lens to the economic world” that empowers the student when learning and understanding economic theory.
  • how a change to the rules of a football/soccer game in the Caribbean between Barbados and Granada created incentives that reflects the behaviour of rational economic agent.
  • how watching the Simpsons can expose us to economic theory with its many parodies.
  • why Robbie believes that the English Premier League is in trouble and has all the hallmarks of a bubble.
  • how the different economic structures of the US (free market) and Europe (socialist) are reversed when it comes to the economic model of sports.
  • how the debt/GDP ratio imposed on EU countries is similar to the debt/income rules imposed on football clubs.
  • why big clubs may be willing to break the spending rules of the game despite the imposition of monetary fines.
  • about the use of metrics by Billy Bean’s Oakland A’s and how a ‘mediocre’ team could beat the cash-rich New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox.

Advice:

On Learning and Teaching Economics:

“We all have to develop ourselves and our understanding”.

If you work hard, you get the returns – there are no shortcuts @RobbieButlerUCC

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On Research:

“Try and keep the material as current as you possibly can”.

Personal Habits:

  • Robbie, like all great educators, is always learning about the most optimal ways to teaching economics.
  • When working with a group who share the same website, it is best to leave each post unpublished as a draft so that your colleagues can give some critical advice or recommendations before being published.
  • Constantly updating the teaching material.

Takeaway:

On Hard Work:

“Hard work is everything. Nobody is born with an innate ability to do something. The harder you work, the easier things become. Thant applies to college, studying, sports and life in general” – Robbie Butler, UCC.

On the Value of Informal Meet-ups:

Some of our coffee meetings can be quite vicious, but it’s a good sounding board for ideas @RobbieButlerUCC

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On Ways of Learning:

“People develop their understanding of different concepts in different ways. Some people have very good spatial recognition and may not be good at logical reasoning. Other people are fantastic musicians or artists. some people are very good numerically. So, because we all learn in very different ways, we need to teach in such a way that tries to capture as many forms of multiple intelligence theory as we can. We use sports as a lens to the economic world”.

On Sports in Economics:

We use sport as a lens to the economic world – @RobbieButlerUCC

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On the Use of Data:

“When you’re teaching economics or doing research, data is key and lots of data in sport is collected for us. There are so many things we can analyse from an economic perspective using the lens of sport”.

Recommended Books:

Favorite Internet Resources:

Where To Find Robbie Butler:

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004: Jadrian Wooten on Using Sports to Carve Out a Career in Economics – Sports Economics

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Episode 004: Jadrian Wooten on Using Sports to Carve Out a Career in Economics – Sports Economics

Jadrian WootenJadrian Wooten is an Economics lecturer at Pennsylvania State University. Jadrian’s research focuses primarily on sports economics. He has a PhD from Washington State University and an MBA from Sam Houston State University.  He analyses various economic concepts that otherwise would not be evident by a typical sports fan or analyst. Jadrian shares his passion for teaching economics and believes that an interactive classroom is the best learning environment.

Economics and Finance Themes:

In this interview, Jadrian mentions and discusses: economics in sports, price discrimination, market structures, decision-making, some of his academic papers, over-confidence, Billy Bean, John Nash, Jim Cramer, stock markets, behavioral psychology, herding, contrarian investors, unemployment, labor economics and loss-aversion.

Jadrian’s Influencers:

His past lecturers, particularly Professor Mark Frank and Professor Darren Grant of Sam Houston State University.

Find Out:

  • how Jadrian found a love for economics and the moment he wanted to teach it.
  • which academic paper made Jadrian realise that you can combine sports with economics and have the ‘dream job’.
  • about Jadrian’s unique teaching style and how it culminated from the collective influences of past professors.
  • how Jadrian used billions of tweets on Twitter to identify over-confidence in a sport pundits’ predictions of outcomes in games.
  • who has a better prediction rate for sports results – amateurs or pundits.
  • what type of words you should use so as to increase your Twitter followers.
  • Jadrian’s opinion on online learning and the use of social media in knowledge sharing.

Advice:

‘You’ll be successful in this class, as an adult and in life, if you just read’ – Jadrian Wooten

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The more you read, even books that are non-academic, you can see economic applications.

Personal Habits:

  • Jadrian sees economics all around him and has developed a new passion for it each semester. Jadrian focuses a lot of his time and effort outside of the classroom on explaining economics to people who may not be taking it in school. Whether that’s online or whether they are doing research, Jadrian likes to talk to them about how economics can be used in their everyday life.
  • “My goal is try to get people reading about economics or thinking about economics. Even if they are not going to university, there are still plenty of popular press books that they can use to kind of learn the basics and get excited about it” – Jadrian Wooten.
  • “I am a word minimizer when it comes to slides. I love talking. I have no problem chatting with students and being in front of the classroom.”
  • “I am a big believer in showing them data, showing them graphs, showing them stuff that’s actually going on – actual application.”
  • “I am a big believer in the ‘Zero Inbox’. I don’t keep e-mails in my inbox. If something comes into my e-mail, I’ll respond to it immediately if I can.”

Takeaway:

‘Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right’ – Henry Ford

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If you think you have the ability when you start and if you put your mind to it, you can achieve the things that you want to do and if you don’t think that you can do it, then you know that’s also true, you are going to end up failing because of self-defeat.

‘Anyone who stops learning is old, whether twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young and the greatest you can do is to keep your mind young’ – Mark Twain

‘Dedicate time in your day to reading… it can be just books in general’ – Jadrian Wooten

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Recommended Books:

Favorite Internet Resource:

  • Calendly.com makes life easy for business professionals and their customers by streamlining administrative tasks through simple, beautiful scheduling software.

Where to Find Jadrian Wooten:

 

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