Professional golf: labor or leisure

Although most labor and microeconomic textbooks contain a theoretical discussion of the backward‐bending labor supply curve, scant empirical evidence of this phenomenon exists. In this paper we investigate the behavior of PGA golf professionals as they make labor‐leisure choices for performing on the PGA Tour. Using tournament theory to model this labor market and data from tournament performances over three seperate years, we find significant evidence that higher paid PGA Tour players do indeed operate in the backward‐bending region of their labor supply curves.