China spent far more on the 2008 Olympiad than any previous host country. A retrospective assessment of the benefits of the 2008 Games to the Chinese economy will not be possible for several years. We use an adaptation of event study methodology that has been employed by studies of previous...

The role of the manager in promoting production is a little-understood phenomenon. In particular, it is difficult to separate managers’ contributions from the abilities of the workers they supervise. Firms may therefore mistakenly attribute the contributions of the workers to the managers who...

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...

In an earlier paper, Kowalewski and Leeds showed that free agency and the salary cap brought profound changes to the level and nature of players' salaries in the National Football League (NFL). Their study is limited, however, by the fact that--unlike most other professional athletes--football...

We add to the literature on Olympic performance by explicitly studying the determinants of women’s performance at the Games.We estimate separatemodels ofmedal production formen and women over the last four Summer Olympic Games. The production of medals is a function of capital, labor, and...

The relevance of sunk costs in decision making is one of the major sources of disagreement between neoclassical economists and behavioral economists. We test the importance of sunk costs by examining the role of a player's draft position on his playing time in the National Basketball...

Quantile regression provides sports economists with a powerful research tool. Unlike least squares, it is not tied to restrictive assumptions about the distribution of the error term, which makes it particularly valuable in settings with highly skewed distributions, like sports labor markets. It...

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...