An Absence of Competition ― The Sustained Competitive Advantage of the Monopoly Sports Leagues

This multidisciplinary examination of the four major professional sports leagues in the USA—football, basketball, ice hockey, and baseball—analyzes the leagues’ long-term competitive advantage from economic, political, and strategic management perspectives.

Neil Longley has both an MBA and a PhD in Economics and has published 23 articles in peer-reviewed academic journals during his career, along with five chapters in edited scholarly books. His research has spanned several areas in applied microeconomics: public choice, public finance, labor economics, international trade, and sports economics. With the latter, his research pertaining to labor market discrimination in sports has been particularly influential, and has significantly impacted the direction of the literature in that area. His research has appeared in such journals as Applied Economics Letters, Public Choice, Contemporary Economic Policy, Atlantic Economic Journal, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Journal of Sports Economics, and Managerial and Decision Economics, to name a few. Most recently, he had an article (co-authored with Leo Kahane and Rob Simmons) accepted for publication in the prestigious Review of Economics and Statistics. The paper uses a sport setting to examine the extent to which co-worker heterogeneity impacts firm-level output. Longley was the recipient of the 2010-11 “Outstanding Research Award” in the Isenberg School of Management, out of approximately 125 full-time faculty in the School.