Is There Salary Discrimination by Race and Nationality in the NBA? A New Approach

This study seeks to investigate the existence of salary discrimination in the National Basketball Association (NBA). According to Gary Becker’s theory of discrimination in labor economics, this study focuses on employer discrimination. While previous research has examined discrimination based on race and nationality separately, this paper combines them to analyze the issue comprehensively. Specifically, the study focuses on whether salary discrimination occurs among American-white, American-nonwhite, other country-white, and other country-nonwhite individuals. Therefore, based on the data collected from Basketball Reference for the 2021–2022 season, a Mincer equation has been constructed to predict the effect of experience, races, nationality, and players’ performance on earnings. The OLS regression result provides the evidence that there was no such race or nationality discriminations in NBA.