Can raising awareness of racial bias subsequently reduce that bias? We address this question by exploiting the widespread media attention highlighting racial bias among professional basketball referees that occurred in May 2007 following the release of an academic study. Using new data, we...

Based on a unique composite dataset measuring heterogeneous sports participation, labour market outcomes and local facilities provision, this paper examines for the first time the association between different types of sports participation on employment and earnings in England. Clear...

In this paper, we try to show that, apart from the negative impact of the Champions League, the growing gap between the Big 5 football countries in Europe and the smaller countries is caused by the deregulation of the European player labour market without deregulating the European football...

Sports leagues constitute one of the few examples of legally operating cartels. In this paper I examine how gate revenue sharing may serve to coordinate talent investments within these cartels. I show that sharing revenues has the potential to raise cartel profits, because it decreases the...

We show that professional soccer players exhibit reference-dependent behavior during matches. Controlling for the state of the match and for unobserved heterogeneity, we show on a minute-by-minute basis that a player breaches the rules of the game, measured by the referee’s assignment of...

In this note I estimate and compare Tullock- and Hirshleifer-style contest success functions (CSFs) using data from the 4 major American sports leagues. I find that Tullock CSFs based on relative efforts fit the data better than Hirshleifer CSFs based on absolute effort differences.

We use a public referendum on a new air traffic concept in Berlin, Germany as a natural experiment to analyze how the interaction of tenure and capitalization effects shapes the outcome of direct democracy processes. We distinguish between homevoters, i.e., voters who are homeowners, and...

Collective sales of media rights are a common practice in sports leagues. Proponents of the system claim that it is a necessary tool for the maintenance of competitive balance. In this empirical paper, I argue that, in European soccer, collective sales do not increase competitive balance as...

This paper investigates whether a nation’s contingent value of hosting a mega-event depends on past experience with implied public goods benefits for its residents. Applying data from an ex-ante and ex-post query based on contingent valuation methods, we use the FIFA World Cup 2006 as a...

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