Mardi | 2009-11-10

O. GERGAUD – Vincenzo VERARDI – Cyrille PIATECKI

When studying the problem of the emergence of superstars, scholars face dif-…culties in measuring talent, obtaining con…dential data on earnings, and …ndingeconometric techniques that are robust to the presence of outliers (superstars).In this paper we use a quasi-experimental dataset from the Pokemon trading cardgame in which (i) there is no unidenti…able heterogeneity, (ii) rarity can be sepa-rated from talent and (iii) objective earnings are observable through transactionprices. Using semi-parametric estimation techniques, we …nd that the seminaltheories of superstars developed by Rosen (1981) and Adler (1985) are comple-mentary and not, as is often claimed, mutually exclusive.