The authors use data that are collected from the 2007 season to study attendance at Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) games. Like Major League Baseball (MLB) teams, Japanese teams set price in the inelastic portion of the demand curve, but standard explanations for low prices do not apply. The...

We analyze the determinants of salaries for players in Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) using performance data from 2004 to 2006 and compensation data from 2005 to 2007. We find that salaries in NPB are determined by different factors than those that drive salaries in Major League Baseball...

In the space of one week, cyclist Floyd Landis went from hero to villain when his remarkable comeback to win the 2006 Tour de France was nullified by a positive drug test. I use event study techniques to analyse the impact of Landis's rise and fall on the profitability of Phonak, his team's...

One can define entrepreneurship, at its most basic level, as rent-seeking behavior. This behavior can be productive, as when firms innovate to create new or better products or when they enter a market to increase output where price exceeds marginal cost. Rent-seeking can also be unproductive,...

In response to declining budgets, many school districts in the US have reduced funding for sports. In Europe, parents may respond to difficult economic times by spending less on sports clubs for their children. Such cuts are unwise if participating in sports is an investment good as well as a...

A large experimental literature has arisen that shows significant differences in how men and women respond to economic contests. Non-experimental studies, however, frequently contradict the experimental findings. We use data from the ATP and WTA professional tennis tours (in which all contests...

Since the 1990s, an increasing number of professional sports teams have sold the naming rights for their facilities to private firms. Although some policy makers have protested the private sector's appropriation of naming rights, no one has questioned the value of this strategy to the firms that...