NBA Player Salaries

2026 Projects

Format: Online
Number of Students: 2
Duration of Project: 4 weeks, starting in the first week of July 2026
Project Supervisor: Basak Altan, Gonul Sengul
Research Areas: Labor Economics, Industrial Organization, Sports Analytics,
Daily Supervisor: Basak Altan, Gonul Sengul

Project Description:

The student will assist in constructing a structured dataset combining NBA player salaries, roster information, game-level outcomes, player participation (minutes played), and lineup-level performance statistics. The work will focus on data collection, cleaning, organization, and documentation to prepare high quality datasets, ready to be used for econometric analysis.

About the Project:

This research project aims to use data from the National Basketball Association (NBA), where salaries and performance are publicly observable at high frequency. By examining how wage dispersion interacts with team structure, the project aims to contribute to broader debates about inequality and incentives.

Project Objectives:

Build a comprehensive NBA team-season, game-lineup, player injury and wage panel dataset.
Gather data on changes took place in NBA.
Produce clean, documented datasets ready for academic analysis.

Project Tasks:

Collecting and verifying player salary data by team and season.
Compiling roster and player participation data (games played, minutes per game, season totals).
Extracting and organizing lineup combinations and associated performance metrics.
Collecting player injury data.
Producing clear documentation describing all variables, sources, and data construction steps.

Deliverables:

A cleaned Master Dataset (several thousands of team-game observations).
A manual documenting how player trades and injuries were handled in the data.
Preliminary Visualizations (Scatter plots of Wage Gini).

Benefits for the Student:

Exposure to academic research in economics
Training in structured data collection
Experience working with real-world large datasets

Requirements:

Knowledge of basketball statistics and interpretation
Comfort with spreadsheets (Excel)
Strong attention to detail
Reliability and commitment to accuracy
Ability to follow structured instructions carefully

Projects for 2026

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Özyeğin University Summer Research Internship project is open to high school students and the aim of the program is to increase their experience on how scientific research is conducted.

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2026 Projects