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We examine the out-of-market gap – the time between the end of a film’s theatrical run and its release on DVD – for a sample of U.S. films during 1988-2005. The average gap declined from 58.14 days in 1998 to 27.93 days in 2005; by 2005, 39% of the films were released on DVD prior to leaving the theaters. Probit and hazard models are estimated to explore the factors that influence a distributor’s decision to release a film on DVD before it exits the theaters, and the timing of the release for films that appear on DVD after they leave the theaters.

We present a comparison of two voting models to forecast election into The National Baseball Hall of Fame by the Baseball Writers Association of America. Although both voting models provide similar predictions on which eligible players should be elected into the Baseball Hall of Fame, we believe that the voting model that uses individual performance variables rather than a single performance index is marginally better because it allows the data to determine the relative importance of the individual performance variables included in the single performance index. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We investigate whether black, Latin, and white major league baseball players receive the same consideration by the Baseball Writers' Association of America in voting for membership into The National Baseball Hall of Fame. The first stage of Heckman's two-step procedure indicates that the probability a black player will ever receive at least one vote is significantly lower than that for his white counterpart. The second stage suggests that race or ethnicity sometimes matter in determining the number of votes a candidate receives for Hall of Fame membership. (JEL J7, D72)

A longitudinal data base is used to estimate racial wage differentials for young nonfarm rural workers for 1968, 1973, and 1978. The empirical results indicate the existence of large wage differentials between young white and young black nonfarm rural workers of both sexes. The results also indicate that the wage differential for young men has increased over time while the differential for young women has decreased slightly over time.

Racial discrimination against black Americans continues to exert a pervasive influence on all aspects of American life. This paper investigates the reliability of two techniques currently used by local fair housing groups to measure the extent of racial discrimination in the rental housing market: in-person audits and telephone audits. When we do not control for the presence of vacancies, we observe a moderate rate of reliability between the in-person audits and the telephone audits. When we control for the presence of vacancies, we observe a much higher degree of reliability between the two methods used to detect racial discrimination in rental housing markets. We conclude that these techniques are useful devices to detect racial discrimination in housing markets.