In many situations, agents take risks by choosing an action that increases their performance immediately, but that potentially leads to a large loss. The current paper studies how such risk-taking behavior depends on the level of competition that the agents face. We study a tournament model and...

While most of the available literature on competitive balance analyzes its impact on ticket sales and TV audiences, little empirical research is available that analyzes the observable variation in competitive balance across leagues and over time. This paper studies the concentration of player...

This paper analyses the Relative Age Effect (RAE) in German elite youth soccer academies. We examine the efficiency of talent selection and the returns to training. Our results indicate a strong effect of players' birth dates on their probability of getting selected - and, thus, a waste of...

The study investigates the importance of poor local labor market conditions in explaining the labor market behavior of married women in urban India. Using nationally representative employment data, we empirically test for the existence of a discouraged worker effect arising from either of two...

Using a natural experiment induced by the COVID-19 pandemic, we test how the sudden absence of supporters at football games impacts the performance of players from minority groups in Italy. We find that African players, who are most commonly targeted by racial harassment, experience a...

We make two main contributions to the literature on work-related injury risk and economic outcomes in the context of American professional football. One is to examine an increasingly important specific injury, concussions, and compare its subsequent economic effects to those of other types of...

This paper examines the relationship between customer preferences and ethnic team composition in German professional soccer. Ethnic team composition is measured using facial recognition techniques, player names, and nationality. The study uses a difference-in-differences approach to show that...

Using data from the 1995-2006 LPGA Tour, we analyse players’ response to the presence of Annika Sorenstam, a dominant champion on the LPGA Tour at the time. We find that the measures of players’ responses are highly sensitive to specification. Employing course fixed effects (FEs) greatly...

It has been established in the economics literature that competitive outcomes can be well predicted by the aggregate salaries of the contesting participants. In this paper we use this idea to construct a forecast test to evaluate a novel, and hitherto unevaluated source of wage data. If the...

We estimate the effect of racial congruence in middle management on firm performance using the National Collegiate Athletic Association Division 1 Football Bowl Subdivision setting. We first identify the effects of leadership representation on racialized minority recruitment into central...