Although the theoretical literature on corruption is well developed, empirical work in this area has lagged because it has proven difficult to isolate corrupt behavior in the data. In this paper, we look for evidence of corruption in an unlikely place: the highest echelons of Japanese sumo...

This paper analyzes the dynamics of prices in two online secondary markets for Major League Baseball tickets. Controlling for ticket quality, prices tend to decline significantly as a game approaches. The paper describes and tests alternative theoretical explanations for why this happens in...

The market for sports gambling is structured very differently than the typical financial market. In sports betting, bookmakers announce a price, after which adjustments are small and infrequent. As a consequence, bookmakers do not play the traditional role of market makers whose primary function...

This paper provides empirical evidence of favoritism by agents, where that favoritism is generated by social pressure. To do so, we explore the behavior of professional soccer referees. Referees have discretion over the addition of extra time at the end of a soccer game (called injury time), to...

Individuals who engage in "judging" - that is, rendering a determination in a dispute or contest between two parties - might be influenced by public pressure to favor one of the parties. Many rules and arrangements seek to insulate such individuals from public pressure or to address the effects...

This paper uses play-by-play accounts of virtually all regular season National Football League games for 1998-2000 to analyze teams' choices on fourth down between trying for a first down and kicking. Dynamic programming is used to estimate the values of possessing the ball at different points...

Many interesting elements of supply and demand are starkly observable in professional athletics. Understanding institutional arrangements, competitive balance and labor-management relations requires a basic understanding of sports labor markets and the struggle for control of those markets...

Recent theoretical and empirical work characterizes attention as a limited resource that decision-makers strategically allocate. There has been less research on the dynamic interdependence of attention: how paying attention now may affect performance later. In this paper, we exploit...

We investigate the effect of hiring skilled immigrant employees on the performance of organizations. This relationship has been difficult to establish in prior work due to theoretical ambiguity, limited data, and inherent endogeneity. We overcome these difficulties by studying European football...