It is well known that non-cognitive skills are an important determinant of success in life. However, their returns are not simple to measure and, as a result, relatively few studies have dealt with this empirical question. We consider sports participation while at school as one way of improving or signalling the individual’s non-cognitive skills endowment. We use four waves of Add Health data t...

Le développement de projets culturels territoire apparaît comme un élément différenciation et d’accroissement l’attractivité (Plaza, 2000). Cependant, les conditions réussite ces semblent être différentes selon qu’il s’agisse territoires urbains ou ruraux, or derniers restent encore peu étudiés (Delfosse, 2015 ;...

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball tournament qualifies as a sports mega-event, and cities across the United States compete vigorously with one another to host what is, by most measures, the premier intercollegiate sporting event in the United States. The promise of substantial economic impact has convinced cities to “invest” substantial sums of money to meet the dem...

This paper examines the impact of receiving a new stadium on team franchise values. I argue that a new stadium will increase the franchise values of teams regardless of how construction was financed. A team playing in a stadium that it owns will be able to capitalize the value of the stadium in the team’s franchise value and will thus have a higher franchise value. Using panel data for Major Le...

A range of cross-sectional models are estimated with a view to establishing the factors that determine the valuation of professional athletes in a highly-specialised sport, with an application to cricket’s Indian Premier League (IPL). We distinguish between personal characteristic and playing ability factors, and with respect to the former, between ability in different forms of the sport. We fi...

The favorite-longshot bias describes the longstanding empirical regularity that betting odds provide biased estimates of the probability of a horse winning—longshots are overbet, while favorites are underbet. Neoclassical explanations of this phenomenon focus on rational gamblers who overbet longshots due to risk-love. The competing behavioral explanations emphasize the role of misperceptions o...

Previous research on point spread betting assumed that bookmakers attract an equal volume of bets on either side of games in order to maximize profits. This paper examines the viability of this assumption from a theoretical and empirical perspective. The model of bookmaker behavior developed predicts that expected returns are not necessarily maximized when the volume of bets on each side of a g...

We use Hurricane Katrina’s damage to the Mississippi coast in 2005 as a natural experiment to study business survival in the aftermath of a cost shock. We find storm damage had a “cleansing” effect on businesses: damaged establishments that returned to operation were more resilient than those that had never been damaged. This effect is particularly strong for establishments belonging to younger...

The tradition of tossing a coin to decide who bats first in a cricket match introduces a randomly-assigned advantage to one team that is unique in sporting contests. In this paper we develop previous work on this issue by examining the impact of the toss on outcomes of day-night one day international games. We estimate conditional logit models of outcomes using data from every day-night interna...

Theories of rational addiction posit that certain habit-forming goods—characterized by an increasing marginal utility of consumption—generate predictable dynamic patterns of consumer behavior. It has been suggested that attendance at sporting events represents an example of such a good, as evidenced by the pricing strategies of commercial sports interests. In this essay, we provide new evidence...