Am 13. Juli 2001 hat das Internationale Olympische Komitee (IOC) auf seiner Sitzung in Moskau über die Ausrichtung der Olympischen Sommerspiele 2008 entschieden: Peking ist der Austragungsort der olympischen Sommerspiele. Somit sind die Chancen einer erfolgreichen europäischen Bewerbung für...

In France, football has become a political issue. Concerned by the decline of French clubs in European competitions, the Government is considering several reforms to give clubs more financial resources to compete with the best European clubs. This paper, empirically based on a panel database,...

In this study I use the German Socio-Economic Panel to evaluate the impact of leisure sport participation on the unemployment duration. The empirical literature on sport participation has focused on labour market outcomes and job quality while the impact of this activity on job search has not...

It is well known that non-cognitive skills are an important determinant of success in life. However, their returns are not simple to measure and, as a result, relatively few studies have dealt with this empirical question. We consider sports participation while at school as one way of improving...

The relative standard deviation of win percentages, the most widely used measure of within-season competitive balance, has an upper bound which is very sensitive to variation in the numbers of teams and games played. Taking into account this upper bound provides additional insight into...

This paper develops a new simulation-based measure of playoff uncertainty and investigates its contribution to modelling match attendance compared to other variants of playoff uncertainty in the existing literature. A model of match attendance that incorporates match uncertainty, playoff...

This paper re-examines the calculation of the relative standard deviation (RSD) measure of competitive balance in leagues in which draws are possible outcomes. Some key conclusions emerging from the exchange between Cain and Haddock (2006) and Fort (2007) are reversed. There is no difference,...

Bonus point systems are a popular tournament design feature in some sports. We consider a bonus point system for the Australian Football League (AFL). In this paper, we utilise league points as a measure of team strength in a prediction model and choose the allocation of points to maximise...

Bonus points provide a simple way to improve the accuracy of league standings. We investigate the inclusion of bonuses in the National Football League (NFL) using a prediction model built on league points. Both touchdown-based and narrow-loss bonuses are shown to be significant. Our preferred...

In this study we use the German Socio-Economic Panel to evaluate the impact of leisure sport participation on the unemployment duration. The empirical literature on sport participation has focused on labour market outcomes and job quality while the impact of this activity on job search has not...