In this comprehensive Handbook, John Goddard and Peter Sloane present a collection of analytical contributions by internationally regarded scholars in the field, which extensively examine the many economic challenges facing the world's most popular team sport.

This paper uses the Luenberger productivity indicator to evaluate productivity changes of European airlines, combining operational and financial variables from 2000 to 2011. For comparative purposes the Malmquist index is estimated. Three low cost European airlines are inserted in the data set,...

This paper uses structural equation modeling to examine the linkages between financial performance, sporting performance and stock market performance for English football clubs over the period from 1995 to 2007. The results indicate that there is a strong correlation between financial and...

This paper addresses empirically financial and operational performance of Italian airports using data envelopment analysis (DEA) methodology. With panel data for 2001–2003, the study tests variable relationships—the relative roles of dimension, managerial status and workload...

This paper proposes a framework for benchmarking Portuguese bus companies and the rationalisation of their operational activities, using the Luenberger productivity indicator. A key advantage of this method is that it allows for both input contraction and output expansion in determining relative...

In this paper, the productivities of Japanese airports over the period of 1987-2005 are analyzed using the Malmquist index, and technological bias is investigated. During this period, airports on average became less efficient and experienced technological regress. Our results indicate that the...

This study examines the degrees of time persistence in U.S. total renewable energy consumption using innovative fractional integration and autoregressive models with monthly data from 1981:1 to 2010:10. The results indicate that renewable energy consumption is better explained in terms of a long...

This paper analyzes ownership and unobserved managerial ability as factors affecting the performance of a representative sample of Portuguese wind farms by means of frontier models. These farms are ranked according to their technical efficiency during the period 2004-2008 and homogenous and...

This paper analyses technical efficiency of European banks over the period 1996-2003 with unbalanced panel data techniques. A latent class frontier model is used which allows the identification of different segments in the production frontier. We find that there are three statistically...

This paper seeks to analyse the relationship between wages and education at a European level, using a quantile regression in order to be able to extend the study along the whole wage distribution. This analysis is carried out for a sample of 14 European countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark,...