Participation in sports and participation in cultural activities are usually considered separately in economic empirical studies. Because both of these activities are forms of leisure, this paper analyzes the determination of their consumption as joint and related decisions. Our theoretical...

In Germany, some sports clubs increasingly encounter financial problems due to decreasing public subsidies. A way to compensate for the decrease is to increase membership fees. Therefore, the aim of this study is to analyze members’ willingness-topay (WTP) for membership fees and to identify...

This paper investigates whether there are country-specific characteristics in goal scoring in the final stage of important international football matches. We examine goal scoring, from 1960 onwards, in full ‘A’ international matches of eight national teams: Argentina, Brazil, England,...

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,...

Many previous attempts to estimate attendance demand for sporting events have concluded that teams with market power are nonetheless pricing tickets in the inelastic portion of the demand curve. These studies, however, have suffered from problems with price and seat quality measurement,...

Economists have offered a plethora of studies examining various aspects of professional team sports. Such studies, though, often neglect the playoffs. Given the impact the post-season has on league revenue, as well as the utility generated for both participants and observers of professional...

This paper empirically illustrates the difference between a standard economic impact analysis (EIA) and a cost-benefit analysis (CBA). The EIA was conducted using an existing (input-output) I-O model (STEAM). The benefit side of the CBA included non-local visitor spending, the revenue of the...

This paper aims to contribute to the knowledge regarding individual consumption on sports attendance—a subject that has been rarely analyzed in the economic literature due to the lack of appropriate databases. Specifically, we analyze the determinants of sports attendance consumption using...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of attendance to Division I women’s collegiate basketball programs from 2000-2009. The evidence suggests that women’s basketball attendance is sensitive to many of the same variables known to influence attendance to men’s collegiate basketball,...

We examine the need for and the presence of competitive balance in professional sports leagues. We argue that competitive balance helps to further fan welfare and we propose a new measure of competitive balance that hopefully better reflects the needs of fans—that is, compared with measures...