Comparisons between European and North American sports leagues have occurred over the years. In this paper, we attempt to bring these comparisons down to the essential elements – what has come to be called Rottenberg's (1956) invariance principle and theoretical insights into attempts to alter...

Professional sports leagues have witnessed the appearance of so-called "sugar daddies" - people who invest enormous amounts of money into clubs and become their owners. This paper presents a contest model of a professional sports league that incorporates this phenomenon. We analyze how the...

The regulation of executive pay currently is a topic widely discussed in politics and the media. In this contribution we analyze a sector with a long tradition of pay regulation: professional team sports. We provide an analysis of the most important regulatory practices and their consequences on...

This paper develops a contest model to compare social welfare in homogeneous leagues in which all clubs maximize identical objective functions with mixed leagues in which clubs maximize different objective functions. We show that homogeneous leagues in which all clubs are profit-maximizers...

This paper provides a game-theoretic model of a professional sports league and analyzes the effect of luxury taxes on competitive balance, club profits and social welfare. We show that a luxury tax increases aggregate salary payments in the league as well as produces a more balanced league....

Increasing financial disparity and spiralling wages in European football have triggered a debate about the introduction of salary caps. This paper provides a theoretical model of a team sports leagues and studies the welfare effect of salary caps. It shows that salary caps will increase...

This paper analyzes the effects of a percentage-of-revenue salary cap in a team sports league with win-maximizing clubs and flexible talent supply. It shows that a percentage-of-revenue cap produces a more balanced league and decreases aggregate salary payments. Taking into account the...

In the December 2002 issue of the American Economic Review, Mark Duggan and Steven D. Levitt published an article on corruption in professional sumo. In the present paper, we update Duggan and Levitt's study to take into account changes since January 2000. We find strong statistical evidence...

This paper presents a dynamic model of talent investments in a team sports league with an infinite time horizon. We show that the clubs' investment decisions and the effects of revenue sharing on competitive balance depend on the following three factors: (i) the cost function of talent...

Third party money injections of benefactors (sugar daddies) function as a bailout mechanism for otherwise insolvent football clubs. The successful implementation of the new UEFA "financial fair play" regulations will abrogate this bailout mechanism. We develop a theoretical model of a...