Clay Collins

We examine the labour market choices of elite women’s college basketball recruits in response to the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization United States Supreme Court decision that overturned federal abortion rights protected by Roe v. Wade. Despite widespread media attention, limited empirical work has evaluated the effect of Dobbs on women’s labour market decisions. Our study evaluates the immediate effects of the Dobbs Supreme Court decision within the context of women’s college basketball using ESPN recruiting data from the 2021–2024 high school classes. We assess whether institutions located in states enacting total abortion bans were less likely to attract elite playing talent. After controlling for head coach and institutional characteristics, our differences-in-differences analysis indicates individual state abortion bans significantly altered the commitment decisions of women’s college basketball recruits. Institutions located in states enacting full abortion bans experienced a statistically significant drop in their recruiting ranking of over eight and one-half places. This suggests talented female workers consider healthcare law when selecting a labour market match.

Tyler Skinner, Steve Salaga, and Clay Collins
Applied Economics Letters

abortion
Dobbs
recruiting
college athletics
women's sport
NCAA

Discrimination and subjective player ratings: Evidence from China

This paper provides an empirical examination of how fans perceive and evaluate athlete performances. Using NBA games during the 2022–23 season, this paper employs a unique dataset from the Chinese app Hupu, which allows users to grade the performances of players for each game. We model, controlling for player characteristics and performance, if ratings respond to game outcomes or a player’s racial characteristics. We use the Classification Algorithm for Skin Color (CASCo) to measure the effect of skin tone on player ratings. We find that controlling for performance, players on winning (losing) teams are rated more positively (negatively), with roughly symmetric effects caused by upsets. Consistently, players with darker skin tones are rated more positively than lighter skin players. The effect appears consistent through a variety of robustness checks.

Shuoyu Chen, Clay Collins, and Ivy Collins
The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance

Performance evaluation
Consumer discrimination
National Basketball Association
Awards

Staying active in cities: dimensions of urban built environment and mass sport participation

Troy T. Zhao, Sam S. Chen, Lan Mu, Yufei Bai, Clay Collins, and James J. Zhang
European Sport Management Quarterly

Urban built environment
Sport participation
SOR theory

How does having a football program affect enrollment at small private colleges?

This paper examines the effects of fielding college football on enrollment and other aspects of NCAA Division III (DIII) institutions. Unlike larger Division I universities, DIII schools, which are primary private colleges, do not award athletic scholarships. Using two-way fixed effect regressions and coarsened exact matching approaches, we examine the presence of a football program on colleges’ enrollment, admissions standards, and finances. We find that having a football team is associated with significant increases in total enrollment as well as increases in both male and female enrollment. We find no evidence that football negatively affects admissions rate or college revenues.

Clay Collins and E. Frank Stephenson
Education Economics

college enrollment
university sports
college football

Contest Outcome Uncertainty and Fan Decisions: A Meta-Analysis

Outcome uncertainty represents a central, defining area of sports economic research. Contest outcome uncertainty (COU), the idea that fan expectations about game outcomes affects attendance decisions, receives substantial attention in the literature, including many papers published in this journal. The standard model of fan decisions under uncertainty generates two diametrically opposed predictions about the COU-attendance relationship, depending on fan preferences, generating tension in the empirical literature. We undertake a meta-analysis of the empirical COU literature to assess empirical support for these predictions. We identify more than 500 empirical model specifications reported in 97 COU papers. The results slightly favor the loss aversion version of the model, but the literature contains no consensus. Sport analyzed and choice of COU proxy variable have no relationship to reported results. Simple OLS and panel data methods generate much of the evidence, highlighting the importance of using causal inference methods in future research.

Clay Collins and Brad Humphreys
Journal of Sports Economics, 23 no.6 (2022): 789-807

uncertainty of outcome hypothesis
contest outcome uncertainty
attendance demand
meta-analysis

The Impact of Sporting and Cultural Events in a Heterogeneous Hotel Market: Evidence from Austin, TX

This paper provides an empirical analysis of how various local political, cultural, and sporting events affect daily room rentals in the Austin, Texas hotel market. In an innovation of previous studies that use daily hotel data, we differentiate how events affect different tiers of hotel rooms ranging from economy hotels to luxury hotels. The results show disparities between events with regard to the quality of hotel demanded. The analysis is extended to daily hotel revenues generated in the six tiers of hotel rooms and how the various events contribute to local and state hotel-occupancy tax revenues.

Clay G. Collins, Craig A. Depken II, and E. Frank Stephenson
Eastern Economic Journal, 48 (2020): 518-547

hotel occupancy
hotel demand
sports tourism

Framing for Dollars: The Effect of Advanced Defensive Metrics on Catchers’ Salaries

Installation of the PITCHf/x pitch tracking system in major league ballparks led to the creation of new metrics of catchers’defensive performance. Using data on free agent signings from 2008 to 2014, this paper shows that catcher salaries adjusted to reflect the new defensive metrics once teams realized the value of the new catcher defense measures.

Thomas A. Carnes, Clay G. Collins, and E. Frank Stephenson
Academy of Economics and Finance Journal, 11 (2021): 21-24

defensive metrics
catchers
player salaries

Presidential inauguration tourism and hotel occupancy: Evidence from the Obama and Trump inaugurals

This article examines the impact of the inaugurations of Barack Obama and Donald Trump on hotel occupancy in the Washington DC metro area. Using daily hotel data from 2010 to 2020 and controlling for multiple other major events along with day, week, and year fixed effects, we find substantial effects of presidential inaugurations on hotel occupancy. Daily occupancy rates around the inaugurations are four to six times higher than the next largest event in our sample. We also find evidence that inaugurations are multiple-day tourist events, with hotel occupancy rates seeing positive leads and lags. We find little difference in overall hotel occupancy impacts between the Obama and the Trump inaugurations, although the pattern differs due to the differences when in the week they occurred. Unfortunately, our results cannot separate the effect of the Women’s March on Washington from the Trump inauguration.

Clay Collins and Joshua C. Hall
Tourism Economics, 28 no. 1 (2020): 83-88

hotel demand
presidential inauguration

Taxing the Travelers: A Note on Hotel Tax Incidence

This paper uses state level monthly hotel occupancy and price data to examine the effects of a $5 per night hotel tax imposed by Georgia in 2015. The results indicate that the tax caused both a decrease in hotel occupancy and a decrease in the net of tax price received by hotels in Georgia, though the latter effect is imprecisely estimated. The implied price elasticity of demand of -0.7 is somewhat larger than previous findings in the literature and suggests that states choosing to adopt hotel taxes do suffer some economic distortions as a result.

Clay Collins and E. Frank Stephenson
Journal of Regional Analysis and Policy. 48 (2018): 7-11

travel
Georgia
hotel occupancy
hotel tax

Book Chapters

Reference Dependent Preferences, Outcome Uncertainty, and Sports Fan Behaviour - A Review of the Literature

Clay Collins and Brad Humphreys
Behavioural Sports Economics: A Research Companion, Routlege (2021)

Awards and Accolades

Executive Committee

North American Association of Sports Economists, 2025