Turner Business Faculty Trailblazers

Sticking the Landing

A new study by Turner College economics professor Frank Mixon and Richard Cebula of George Mason University investigates the pattern of innovations in women’s artistic gymnastics that have led to eponymous gymnastics skills like that developed by, and attributed to, Romanian gymnast Nadia Comăneci.  In her gold medal-winning performance at the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal, Comăneci’s flawless performance of the “Comăneci salto” was a crucial element in scoring a perfect 10 on the uneven bars.  In their 2022 paper appearing in the Journal of Sports Economics, Mixon and Cebula investigate the impact of appropriability on the supply of innovation by examining the frequency of eponymous skills in women’s gymnastics before and during the transition to a new market-based economic order in Eastern Europe.  The study posits that following the early 1990s dissolution the communist governments of the Soviet Bloc and its satellites, the supply of innovation in the form of eponymous skills in women’s gymnastics moved away from these countries and toward western nations, where property rights freedoms were much more secure.  Combining eponymous skills frequency data (from 1969 to the present) with measures of property rights freedom from the Heritage Foundation and the Fraser Institute, goodness-of-fit tests and a stochastic dominance approach support the contention of the study, namely that innovation in this case derives from the ability of athletes to appropriate, through either government support (largesse) or market-based capitalization, the returns to their human capital investments.