In most of the world's professional sport leagues, the worst teams in better leagues are demoted while the best teams in weaker leagues are promoted. This article examines the economics of promotion and relegation, using data from English football (soccer). The crucial findings are as follows:...

The rate of return to investment in thoroughbred racehorses is widely believed to be negative on average. In a world of fully informed market participants, this implies that ownership of a racehorse is motivated in part by nonfinancial attributes, perhaps a taste for sport. This article presents...

Teams in Japan’s two professional baseball leagues began to add foreign players to their rosters in the early 1950s, with the average number of foreign players per team reaching 5.79 in 2004. One reason for their increased use of foreign players was that foreign hitters substantially...

Supporters of mega-sporting events such as the World Cup and Olympics claim that these events attract hoards of wealthy visitors and lead to lasting economic benefits for the host regions. For this reason, cities and countries compete vigorously for the right to stage these spectacles. Recently,...

Civic boosters generally have estimated the Super Bowl to have an impact of $300 to $400 million on a host cityÂ’s economy. The National Football League (NFL) has used the promise of an economic windfall to convince skeptical cities that investments in new stadiums for their teams in exchange...

By definition, giving 100% effort all of the time is sustainable, but begs the question of how to define 100% effort. As a corollary, once a benchmark for defining 100% effort is chosen, it may be possible, even optimal, to give a greater amount of effort for a short period of time, while...