This paper studies the relationship between talent disparity and team productivity based on panel data from German soccer teams. Holding average ability and unobserved team heterogeneity constant, we find evidence that the players selected to play on the competition team should be rather...

We show that both talent and popularity significantly contribute to stars’ market values in German soccer. The talent-versus-popularity controversy on the sources of stardom goes back to Rosen (1981) and Adler (1985). All attempts to resolve the controversy empirically face the difficulty of...

The impact of intra-team pay dispersion on team productivity is a highly discussed issue. On one hand, wage differentials provide incentives for higher employee effort. On the other hand, pay inequality discourages cooperation among team members, which reduces performance. Analyzing non-linear...

The peculiar German football governance structure may be well suited to prevent integrity problems resulting from multiple club ownership or from ownership by "undesired'' persons or entities. However, this effect comes at a price. In the vacuum of power generated within large member...

Based on the analysis of the specific environment in which football clubs compete, this paper presents a comparative institutional analysis of three paradigmatic structures of football club governance: privately owned football firms, public football corporations (stock corporations with...

This paper provides non-experimental field evidence on positive and negative worker reciprocity. We analyze the performance reactions of professional workers to fair and unfair wage allocations in their natural environment. The objects of interest are professional soccer players in the German...

In order to avoid too many tied games after playing the five-minute overtime period, the National Hockey League (NHL) introduced two rule changes in the 1999-2000 season. First, a team that loses in overtime receives one point instead of zero points. Second, the number of skaters in overtime is...

In this paper, we empirically investigate the performance effect of team-specific human capital in highly interactive teams. Based on the tenets of the resource-based view of the firm and on the ideas of typical learning functions, we hypothesize that team members’ shared experience in working...

This study addresses the question how performance expectations affect involuntary managerial change. As we measure performance expectations based on highly efficient bookmaker odds, our specification is less subject to manipulations than the analyst forecasts employed in prior studies. Using...

This paper provides non-experimental field evidence on positive and negative worker reciprocity. We analyze the performance reactions of professional workers to fair and unfair wage allocations in their natural environment. The objects of interest are professional soccer players in the German...