Using data from 1,226 matches played over 18 seasons, we analyse match attendances in the group stages of the European Rugby Cup (ERC). We find that short-run (match) uncertainty had little effect on attendances. This finding is significant as the ERC has been replaced by a new competition which...

The paper presents results from two natural experiments on the impact of revenue sharing and salary caps on competitive balance in sports leagues arising from the introduction of professionalism in Rugby Union in 1995. The first involves the English Premiership, which traditionally applied a...

Rugby union only went professional in 1995, much later than other major team sports resulting in major changes in league structures. Different arrangements regarding revenue sharing and salary caps between the three main European rugby leagues provides an opportunity to test the impact of such...

The economic literature on professional sports leagues suggests supporters' utility depends on uncertainty of outcome (competitive balance) and the quality of play. Unlike soccer, where the Champions League is dominated by teams from larger countries, our analysis indicates that the ERC exhibits...

The paper analyses the impact of the relatively belated move to professionalism in Rugby Union. We use data on match attendance for 3,667 fixtures in European club Rugby over 15 seasons to estimate the effect of competitive balance on attendance. We find that (short- and medium-term) competitive...

By using very rich individual-level data on workers from 28 European countries, we provide the first so extensive cross-country assessment of wage response to global production links within global value chains (GVCs) in the period 2005-2014. Unlike the other studies, we (i) address the...

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the role of trade in productivity growth in a sample of 30 sectors in 25 EU countries in the period of rapid East-West integration. Shift-share analysis is used to show that changes in value added per hour worked in these countries appear to be mainly due...

This paper assesses the impact of international outsourcing/offshoring practices on the process of wage equalization across manufacturing sectors in a sample of EU27 economies (1995-2009). We discriminate between heterogeneous wage effects on different skill categories of workers (low, medium...

This paper describes the construction of a microlevel database on knowledge creation by higher education institutions (KC-HEI), accompanying the Global Knowledge InputOutput database (KIO, Davies et al., 2023). The database was created as part of Project Rethink GCS. KC-HEI links PATSTAT...

This paper investigates how involvement in Global Value Chains (GVCs) affects working conditions. We use linked employer-employee data from the Structure of Earnings Survey merged with industry-level statistics on GVCs based on the World Input-Output Database. The sample consists of almost 9...