Many sports leagues use unbalanced schedules where teams do not play each opponent an equal number of times each season. In many leagues, teams that do not make the playoffs have the opportunity to improve by drafting highly skilled amateur players in the next entry draft, but the opportunity to...

Competitive balance research partitions into two areas: analyzing sports policy and its effect on competitive balance and the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis. This paper examines the latter section. No formal analysis of the relationship between competitive balance and regular season average...

This paper investigates the regional economic impact of the 1996 Olympic Games in Georgia. It questions the findings of Hotchkiss, Moore, and Zobay (2003), who identify significant positive effects of the Olympics on employment in Georgia/USA by first challenging their approach that used a level...

Using the case of the new stadiums for the FIFA World Cup 2006 in Germany, this paper is the first multivariate work that examines the potential income and employment effects of new stadiums outside of the USA. This study is also the first work on this topic that conducts tests on the basis of a...

One of the central particularities in sports leagues is the fact that the clubs compete with each other on the input markets but are obliged to cooperate on the output market (i.e., the league’s games). In order to maximize jointly produced league output, one often hears calls for policy...

When decisions are made to construct new stadia or to undertake major renovation work, the decision makers often assume that more spectators will be attracted. This so-called “novelty effect” is used as an argument that an impulse towards increased demand for the region and its services will...

Research on the effect of sport on communities, specifically on the economics and financing of sports facilities and their relationship to communities, has emerged as an important area of research in sports economics and finance over the past decade. Part of this increased interest may be...

Betting strategies based on the presence of home-underdog bias in the NFL have been shown to produce returns in excess of those predicted by market efficiency in some situations. Dare and Dennis (2011) attribute this bias to bettors underestimating the scoring ability of home underdogs. Using a...

Previous research on point spread betting often assumed that bookmakers attract an equal volume of bets on either side of games in order to maximize profits. This paper examines the plausibility of this assumption. Financial simulations based on actual bet volumes on NFL games, point spreads,...

The International Journal of Sport Finance begins a new era with the publication of this issue (Volume 4, Issue 1). Dennis Howard, the founding editor of IJSF, and Fitness Information Technology, the publishers of the journal, envisioned a change in the IJSF editorial leadership in three-year...