A paper written by Dr. Benjamin Posmanick, assistant professor of Finance, has been published in the Journal of Sports Economics, which is generally considered the top field journal in sports economics.

The paper, titled “Remembering the (College Football) Titans: Integrating College Football in the South,” examines the process of integrating major college football teams in the southern United States following the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

Posmanick finds that, consistent with economic theory on discrimination, teams that were performing worse were more likely to choose to integrate and add Black players, potentially in a bid to increase their performance on the field. The paper is available online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/15270025251372894.