This dissertation uses the institutional setup in the market for NBA players to test important hypotheses about how the labor market functions. Sports markets provide an ideal setting to study economic phenomena because of the wealth of publicly available information on productivity and compensation. In Chapter one, I analyze the effort incentives created by the existence of long-term contracts that guarantee players a wage irrespective of performance. I use a panel of all NBA players from 1999 to 2007 to show that player performance improves as the expiration date of the current contract draws nearer. Players perform ten percent better in the last year of their contract than in the penultimate one, an effect attributable to their interest in gaining a new contract. Despite the adverse effort incentives, teams may still prefer to sign players to multi-period contracts because risk-averse players are willing to accept lower salaries in return for greater security. In Chapter two, I use the fact that the NBA draft provides us with a quasi-natural experiment to analyze the impact of peers on player productivity and earnings. Using information for first round draft picks for a fourteen-year span I find that better teammates have a negative but statistically insignificant effect, on player performance. Teammate quality has a statistically and economically significant adverse impact on player wages. Thus the market appears to penalize players for having better teammates. I focus on the NBA's push to raise the minimum age of entry into the league in Chapter three. This phenomenon seems surprising since one naturally expects employers to encourage and entrenched workers to discourage entry of new workers into the labor market, as this should push wages down. I construct a three-period theoretical model in which the surplus accruing to teams can be higher when entry is restricted, even if the average productivity of NBA players declines. In our setting this outcome is driven by the existence of a fixed wage for rookies, which implies that the rents extracted from new entrants increase when entry is restricted.

Non-overflow flow-through rockfill structures are river engineering elements used to attenuate and delay inflow hydrographs. They represent expedient places to deposit rather enormous quantities of waste rock at mountainous mine sites. Their application has become so common that matters of safety regarding their design have been laid out in Section 8.5 of the Canadian Dam Safety Guidelines (CDA 2007). The research described herein was directed at investigating the different aspects of the hydraulics of these flow-through rockfill structures. In order to assess the potential for an unraveling failure of flow-through rockfill dams, a systematic study of the hydraulic design of these structures was conducted and the non-linear nature of flow through these structures was dealt with using a p-LaPlacian-like partial differential equation. Subsequently, factors of safety against this type of failure are presented for a range of downstream slopes, thus showing the unsafe combinations of embankment slope and particle diameter. Three different index gradients within the toe of such structures were investigated. In this regard, the gradient most suitable for independently computing the height of the point of first flow emergence on the downstream face is examined and a method for independently computing the variation in hydraulic head within that vertical (which allows for the toe of the structure to be isolated) is presented. An additional gradient that allows for the independent estimation of the default tailwater depth is proposed. In order to provide better tools to assess the behavior of these embankments at the toe, laboratory and analytical studies were undertaken. In this regard, the hydraulics associated with the zone of the downstream toe were studied. The depth variation of the seepage-face was computationally modeled, and two approaches for solving the spatially varied flow (SVF) condition problem within the toe region undertaken. The results show that a dual linear variation in depth can be used to good accuracy, without inducing any unrealistic exit gradients in the zone of primary concern with respect to unraveling. It is hoped that these techniques and computational tools provided herein will aid in facilitating the design and assessment of these flow-through rockfill structures.