The paper develops a quality adjusted professional sports franchise price index for North America based on a repeat sale method. This index reflects trends in the general price of sports franchises holding local market, facility, and team characteristics constant. The price index exhibits considerable volatility but no upward trend over time, unlike previous quality adjusted price indexes based...

This paper empirically investigates three hypotheses regarding biases of National Basketball Association (NBA) referees. Using a sample of 28,388 quarter-level observations from six seasons, we find that referees make calls that favor home teams, teams losing during games, and teams losing in playoff series. All three biases are likely to increase league revenues. In order to distinguish betwee...

This paper develops a contest model of a professional sports league in which clubs maximize a weighted sum of profits and wins (utility maximization). The model analyzes how more win-orientated behavior of certain clubs affects talent investments, competitive balance and club profits. Moreover, in contrast to traditional models, we show that revenue sharing does not always reduce investment inc...

Does information processing affect individual risk-taking behaviour? This paper provides evidence that professional athletes suffer from a left-digit bias when dealing with signals about differences in performance. Using data from the highly competitive field of World Cup alpine skiing for the period of 1992–2014, we show that athletes misinterpret actual differences in race times by focusing o...

We investigate the relationship between participation in physical activity and self reported happiness in the United States. IV estimates based on data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System between 2005 and 2009 and County Business Patterns indicate that individuals living in a county with greater access to sports facilities are more likely to participate in physical activity and ...

In recent years there has been some dispute over the appropriate way to model decisionmaking in professional sports leagues. In particular, Szymanski and Kesenne (2004), argue that formulating the decision-making problem as a noncooperative game leads to radically different conclusions about the nature of competition in sports leagues. This paper describes a simulation model that van be used in...

Professional sports franchises have used the lure of economic riches as an incentive for cities to construct new stadiums and arenas at considerable public expense. An analysis of taxable sales in Florida cities demonstrates that none of the 6 new franchises or 8 new stadiums and arenas in the state since 1980 have resulted in a statistically significant increase in taxable sales in the host me...

We show that professional soccer players exhibit reference-dependent behavior during matches. Controlling for the state of the match and for unobserved heterogeneity, we show on a minute-by-minute basis that a player breaches the rules of the game, measured by the referee’s assignment of cards, with a significantly higher probability if his team is behind the expected match outcome, measured by...

This paper reviews the empirical literature assessing the effects of subsidies for professional sports franchises and facilities. The evidence reveals a great deal of consistency among economists doing research in this area. That evidence is that sports subsidies cannot be justified on the grounds of local economic development, income growth or job creation, those arguments most frequently used...

Major League Baseball teams have used the lure of economic riches as an incentive for cities to construct new stadiums at considerable public expense. Estimates of the economic impact of a MLB on host communities have typically been in the vicinity of $300 million. Our analysis suggest these numbers are wildly inflated. Using the baseball strikes of 1981, 1994, and 1995 as test cases, we find t...