The National Basketball Association (NBA) generated well over $4 billion in revenues during the 2014-15 season. I analyze the value of a win to a team in terms of revenue and examine the potential underpayment or overpayment of players and superstars throughout the league relative to their marginal revenue product (MRP). My findings suggest that players are overpaid, especially superstars. However, it is important to consider the fixed-revenue streams a team receives before assuming a player is simply overpaid compared to his MRP. In congruence with previous literature, I find that veterans are overpaid at the expense of younger players’ lower salaries. I also look at the drivers of a player’s salary and find that general managers tend to overpay for points relative to other statistics.

This thesis deals with the determination of the player labour market for the American professional sports league Major League Soccer (MLS). In the theoretical part I focus on the description of the league's development along with the salary politics rules. Using the two stages least square method in the empirical part I then provide the model for the estimation of player's marginal productivity (MRP). In the first step I explain the correlation between the percentages of obtained points by teams with player statistics. In the second step I examine the influence of this variable along with other factors on team's revenues from attendance. Afterwards I compare the calculated player's MRP with their salaries and also test some additional factors that might influence players' salaries. Using this model and also some other simple regressions I conclude that MLS labour market is a monopsony market structure. Besides I found out that forwarders market seems to be the closest part of the MLS labour market to the competitive market structure. In conclusion I discuss possible model's weaknesses, which turned out to be especially dependency of players on their co-players' on-field performance.

This paper deals with the question whether the structure of the labor market in NBA is monopson or not. On the data from the NBA season 2011/12 I estimate player's marginal productivity using two stages least square model. In the first step I determine winner-loss ratio based on players' performance statistics. In the second step I use the results from the first model to predict team's revenues. This effect is controlled by other economic and social variables. Based on this model's results I determined that even though this market is not perfectly competitive, the results are not strong enough for monopson. Short player market could be described as winner-take-all market while on the market for centers there is a balance between pivots and owners and players can obtain their salary equal to their productivity. Then I discovered the superstar effect, according to which stars get bonuses to their salary against the rest of players. Finally it was found out that rookie contracts decrease players' rewards. On the market for centers the life cycle hypothesis holds.

This thesis deals with determination of the labor market structure for professional athletes, specifically the market for players of National Hockey League (NHL). The theoretical part focuses on the development of labor market for athletes and changes in rules that affected this development. In the empirical part I present a model for determining the marginal revenue product (MRP) of players. Further I determine the impact of other factors that have an influence on wage differences between players. Taking all the results I specify the type of market structure, which I determined on the basis of the relationship between MRP of players and their wages. I find out that the market for defenders and forwards of NHL is rather competitive, unlike the market for goalkeepers, which is best describable by the "winner-take-all" theory. At the end of the thesis, the possible errors in the model and data that could affect the outcome are summed up.