Female coaches must invest in coaching licenses to be considered for employment opportunities in European football. Consequently, coaching education represents an investment as part of their human capital. The present research aims to analyze the association between women's existing human capital (schooling, on-the-job training) and the financial investments they have made in their football coaching licenses (other knowledge), as well as the scholarships they have received. Data from female coaches across Europe were collected using an online survey ( n = 1,010). Regression analyses demonstrate that women who hold a master’s degree are more likely to obtain a scholarship, while female coaches without tertiary education are more likely to invest in coaching licenses. Accumulating coaching experiences in men's or women's football, and playing experiences at higher levels (professional, competitive) positively correlate with financial investments. These findings highlight how coaching licenses associate with female coaches’ schooling and on-the-job training sources.
This study examined gender differences in the link between pay and performance in professional basketball. Using National Basketball Association (NBA) and Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) data from the five most recent seasons, we assessed general performance and performance under pressure in clutch time as potential predictors of player salary. Using pooled ordinary least squares regressions, we found substantial gender-specific differences in the translation of on-court productivity into player compensation: NBA salaries responded to a broader set of performance indicators and exhibited stronger effect sizes than salaries in the WNBA. In contrast, the evidence for salary effects of performance under pressure was scarce, with no substantial differences between the NBA and WNBA. The findings provide an updated perspective on the salary-performance relationship in professional basketball. They offer the first detailed insights into payment determinants in the WNBA and deepen our understanding of gender differences in wages and performance under pressure.
Gender equity in intercollegiate athletics remains a central regulatory requirement under Title IX, while recent changes in the institutional environment raise new questions about how universities respond to gender imbalance. Using Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act data from 2010 to 2023, we examine how the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) institutions adjust athletic participation and spending following prior-year underrepresentation of women in athletics. We construct imbalance measures comparing women’s share of athletic participation to women’s share of undergraduate enrollment and estimate fixed-effects panel regressions linking prior imbalance to subsequent institutional adjustments. We find that institutions respond to underrepresentation by increasing women’s athletic participation and reducing men’s participation. Following the name, image, and likeness and the transfer-portal changes, universities increase women’s athletic participation even further. Financial adjustments, however, are marginally different. These findings indicate that roster expansion remains the primary mechanism through which institutions move toward proportionality under Title IX in the current intercollegiate athletics environment.
Advancing digitalization and the availability of real-time data enable leisure businesses to increasingly adopt dynamic pricing strategies. This study examines consumer perceptions of dynamic prices at different booking times in the context of ski resorts. Using survey data from customers across four Austrian ski areas ( n = 1,324), the study investigates how booking timing interacts with word-of-mouth (WOM) intentions. The results show that early bookings enhance perceived fairness and foster positive WOM, whereas late bookings lead to negative perceptions. The study provides a theoretical contribution to the current state of scientific knowledge in the field by addressing an underexplored research context in which consumer responses to dynamic pricing in leisure contexts have received little attention to date. Practical implications are offered to assist operators of leisure and winter sports facilities in implementing efficient and customer-oriented dynamic pricing systems.
This article provides an empirical investigation of potential noneconomic consequences of hosting a major sporting event. Using two datasets of civil unrest events, I test if hosting a Formula One Grand Prix is associated with changes in social and political unrest days. Using propensity score matching, coarsened exact matching, and GMM estimation, results provide limited evidence that hosting a Formula One Grand Prix is associated with fewer days of unrest, suggesting that hosts may see political benefits from hosting major sporting events. However, there is some heterogeneity depending on the dataset used. This article contributes to the discussion examining political benefits and costs of hosting large sporting events, which may need to be taken into account along with the financial benefits and costs.
This study examines how superstars affect players' situational performance in professional men's tennis. We use match-level data from 27,366 main draw Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) singles matches between the 2004 and 2019 seasons. Estimating a high-dimensional fixed effects model, we use ATP serve and return ratings to proxy performance in dominant (serve) and nondominant (return) situations of both higher-ranked (HR) and lower-ranked (LR) players. We provide evidence that HR players deliberately increase/decrease their performance in (non)dominant match situations based on their rank and the timing of facing a superstar in subsequent matches. Similarly, there are differences in the extent of performance shifts induced by superstars among different rank groups for LR players; however, the differences do not extend to different within-match situations.
I explore the impact of competing in elite-level college football on the institution's financial health by analyzing institutions that reclassified from NCAA Division I Football Championship Subdivision to the Football Bowl Subdivision. I find that this reclassification is associated with increases in applications, first-year enrollment, and total enrollment. While it decreases per student tuition revenue relative to its counterfactual, total revenue increases.
Home advantage has been a topic of sports economics research for decades. Although research has found proof for home advantage in many team sports, literature about its role in individual sports is less frequent. Thus, it is still being determined whether (i) home advantage is a significant factor for individual sports and whether (ii) the causes and effects of team sports are transferable and equally valid. In this paper, we provide insights into the existence of home advantage in professional surfing competitions (World Surf League). Our final dataset with 21,013 observations allows us to disentangle the influence of home surfers and judge panel constellations on athlete performances and to test for the combination of both. Even though home advantage does not seem to have a major influence, we find evidence for a potential domestic bias in both the average points scored and the chances of winning a heat per athlete.
This study examines how favoritism influences professional decision-making in high-pressure environments where impartiality is crucial. Using professional football as a laboratory, we leverage novel data that precisely measure discretionary decisions made by highly trained officials. Analyzing over 7,000 decisions across five major European football leagues, we find systematic bias favoring stronger teams that increase with quality disparity and is most pronounced when decisions are highly consequential. These findings contribute to our understanding of favoritism in professional judgment, particularly where discretionary power coincides with quality differences between participants.
This study investigates the existence and market response to the "hot hand" effect among Major League Baseball starting pitchers. Using a novel methodology that classifies pitchers as hot, cold, or neutral based on context-adjusted recent performance, we find strong evidence that short-term streaks predict daily fantasy sports (DFS) outcomes. However, these trends are not fully priced into DraftKings salaries-hot pitchers are underpriced and cold pitchers are overpriced-indicating pricing inefficiencies. In contrast, sportsbook betting lines tend to overreact, particularly for visiting hot and cold home starters. However, simulated betting strategies exploiting these trends do not yield statistically significant positive profits, suggesting that sportsbooks adjust prices to capitalize on user biases. By comparing DFS and betting markets, this paper demonstrates how institutional structures and incentives shape responses to performance signals. The findings offer new insight into pricing dynamics, market efficiency, and behavioral responses in modern sports analytics.
The Major League Baseball draft offers a distinctive setting for examining teams' payment practices. It features team leverage in determining signing bonuses, two primary player groups with differing redraft opportunities, and publicly available rankings that serve as a proxy for players' abilities and characteristics. Since 2012, the bonus pool system has placed caps on each team's total signing bonuses, while still allowing flexibility in bonus allocations across players. Leveraging these institutional features, this study investigates how the bonus pool has influenced the signing bonus gap between high school players and four-year college players. To capture heterogeneous effects across the bonus distribution, we apply unconditional quantile regression. Our results indicate that the gap has widened significantly only in the lower 0.20-th quantiles, with little change in other quantiles. These findings suggest that teams disproportionately shifted the negative financial impact of the bonus pool onto players with the fewest redraft opportunities, offering insights into team behavior and the draft system design.
This study uses contingent valuation to estimate the welfare improvement from upgrading a local football stadium to comply with the first-tier requirements to avoid the local second-tier club being forced to relocate its home matches outside the municipality if it wins promotion. The survey was conducted simultaneously with a public hearing held by Helsing & oslash;r Municipality (in Denmark) regarding the stadium upgrade. Eliciting willingness to pay using a single-bounded dichotomous choice question (referendum-style) for 1,354 respondents, the total economic value is estimated to be between 9.1 and 17.7m, aggregated for the 30,176 municipal households. Based on the non-use values, the maximum level of public subsidies that can be justified is estimated to be between 5.8 and 11.7m. Assuming a plausible 40% budget overrun, the non-use values amount to 40% to 86% of the budgeted capital construction costs, a considerably higher proportion than found in earlier contingent valuation studies, which can primarily be ascribed to the relatively low costs of upgrading the stadium.
This paper assesses the effect of playing time on player performance within the Chinese Basketball Association. The outbreak of the COVID-19 prevented some foreign players from returning to their team during the 2019-2020 season and has led to an increase in playing time for domestic players in overlapping positions. We exploit this exogenous variation in playing time and find that domestic players at affected positions show significantly improved performance, measured by plus-minus values. Quantile regression reveals that domestic players with higher plus-minus values benefit more. The shock of the COVID-19 also positively affects field goal percentage and points per minute. Additionally, we identify persistent performance gains beyond the immediate season.
This paper studies the effect of multiple reference points on decisions made by professional athletes. Unique design features present in elite-level figure skating competitions generate two salient reference points: one reflecting rational expectations about the likelihood of success and the other reflecting information on the performance of previous competitors. An analysis of effort decisions and competition outcomes shows that both reference points affect skaters' decisions; the effect diminishes with experience. The results support the idea that the elimination of market anomalies takes time even for highly trained professionals and the time required varies depending on the specific reference point.
Consider a company that owns two sports TV channels: a popular free-to-air channel and a narrow-profile pay one. The company bought the broadcasting rights for a round-robin championship. When developing the broadcasting strategy, the company's management faces the trade-off between inducing viewers to subscribe to the pay-TV channel and getting revenues from advertisements on the free-to-air channel. Motivated by an anecdotal case of a significant drop in the percentage of broadcasts of best teams among all broadcasts on a free-to-air channel, we propose a theoretical model of broadcasting the championship. We demonstrate that a wide range of strategies can be optimal depending on the market parameters. Whereas the intermediate strategy of broadcasting just weak matches (instead of broadcasting top matches or broadcasting nothing) on the free-to-air channel seems puzzling, we show formally that it can be fully rational for some market configurations. Therefore, we rationalize the puzzling strategy used by the company's management in the motivational example.
Some coaches are so successful and have such an impact on their team that they are considered “legendary.” When they step down from their position and the team transitions to a new head coach, there will likely be a great deal of uncertainty concerning how the team will perform in this new situation; thus, it may take time for the betting markets to adjust. The purpose of this study is to investigate the efficiency of a sports betting market for the rare situation in which a legend steps down from the head coaching position. Data from the National Football League are analyzed using a novel implementation of classification trees to determine if and when a market inefficiency exists in the subsequent season. We find a potential bias early in the following season before the market appears to adjust to the new coach.
The theory of multi-sided markets has recently been increasingly applied to the team sports industry. However, empirical studies providing information on the existence and strength of network effects between the different platform sides have been lacking so far. We address this research gap using revenue figures from the annual financial statements of 107 European football clubs (n = 476) published between 2015 and 2019. The results show that even when other relevant demand determinants are taken into account, (a) matchday revenues are positively dependent on commercial, media, and previously generated matchday revenues, (b) commercial revenues are influenced by matchday revenues, and (c) media revenues are independent of other revenue streams. The quantification of revenue dependencies provides the first empirical evidence for the existence of network effects in the team sport industry. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.
The article presents a theoretical model and its corresponding empirical test on the indirect effects of participation in sports on entrepreneurship among non-professional athletes. The empirical strategy consists of panel data econometric techniques, controlling for confounding factors and possible endogeneity concerns. Data are taken from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (n = 197,699 observations from 33,889 individuals over the years 2000-2019). The results suggest that individuals who engage in sports and/or physical exercise are more likely to become entrepreneurs, including self-employed individuals, as well as to hire more workers compared to their sedentary counterparts. Overall, non-professional athletes may increase their likelihood of becoming entrepreneurs by 12% to 36% (odds ratios), and hire about 1% to 2% more employees. Therefore, entrepreneurship should be added to the long list of reasons for the promotion of sports and physical exercise. Other implications and specific findings by age, gender, and type of sport are discussed.
Interest in women's sports, particularly football, has surged in recent years, with growing spectatorship and media coverage. Despite this, women's football in England remains in an early stage of growth, with attendances significantly below that of men's football. This study examines the determinants of attendance in the English Women's Super League (WSL) from 2011 to 2023, focusing on potential spillover effects from men's football. Analyzing 775 matches, we review how the men's team performance and brand strength influence attendance at women's matches. It is found that three main factors drive WSL attendance: (a) Team and game characteristics, such as team performance, weather, and team rivalry, (b) Success of the national team, and (c) Performance and characteristics of the men's team, showing a significant spillover effect. Such results offer key insights to stakeholders, as considering spillover effects can enhance investment strategies and foster growth in women's football.
This study investigates the role of sport-based corporate social responsibility (SCSR) in enhancing corporate financial performance (CFP) and mitigating market risks during the disruptive events of the COVID-19 pandemic. It specifically examines the insurance-like protection offered by SCSR, focusing on the relationship between these activities and firm value during systemic crises. The analysis includes 159 companies that were recipients of Taiwan's iSport Corporate Award, utilizing event study methods and regression modeling to evaluate the impact of SCSR on stock abnormal returns and CFP during two stock market crashes induced by COVID-19. The findings reveal that firms engaged in SCSR experienced smaller declines in stock prices compared to the broader market, confirming the value-protective effect of sports-related CSR. This research highlights the potential of SCSR to act as a safeguard for firm value during economic downturns, offering crucial insights into the strategic benefits of CSR investments.
