Compensation Discrimination for Defensive Players: Applying Quantile Regression to the National Football League Market for Linebackers

Using data from 2001 to 2009, quantile regression techniques are used to analyze the presence of discrimination in the National Football League (NFL) market for linebackers. This article uses both binary variable and decomposition approaches. An extension of the Oaxaca Blinder decomposition to quantile regression, proposed by Melly, is estimated to decompose the earnings gap across the distribution. This article concludes that discrimination is present in the linebacker market. This result is robust to approach and evident across the entire distribution. This result differs from much of the previous research on professional football.