One major argument to legitimize the transfer system in European club football is that transfer fees paid by hiring clubs result in a redistribution of revenues from large market to small market clubs, which may lead to more intense on-field competition. We investigate this claim using a unique...

The lawsuit Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard University provided an unprecedented look at how an elite school makes admissions decisions. Using publicly released reports, we examine the preferences Harvard gives for recruited athletes, legacies, those on the dean's interest list, and...

Applications to elite US colleges have more than doubled over the past 20 years, with little change in the number of available seats. We examine how this increased competition has affected the admissions advantage that legacies and athletes (LA) receive. Using data on Harvard applications over...

Using data from 2005 to 2016, this paper examines if players in the National Hockey League (NHL) are being paid a positive differential for their services due to the competition from the Kontinental Hockey League (KHL) and the Swedish Hockey League (SHL). In order to control for performance, we...

Despite the globalisation of European soccer, each professional league exhibits specificities. French Ligue 1 sometimes contends with the trading-off of financial performance against sporting performance of its teams in European soccer competitions, and its inner auditing body, the Direction...

Basketball is one of the most practised sports in the world, especially in America. America has the most famous professional basketball league, the National Basketball Association (NBA). This study examines whether there is a relationship between the physical constitution of professional...

This article investigates the influence of performance, popularity and power on "superearnings" using a unique panel dataset of Italian football players built on various sources of data. Using OLS, Panel and Unconditional Quantile regression techniques, we find that detailed measures of these...

The effect of marriage on productivity and wages has been long debated. A difficulty in estimating the effect of marriage on productivity is the lack of data that contain measures of both marital status and exogenous productivity. We fill this gap by using a sample of professional athletes from...

We revisit the incentive effects of elimination tournaments with a fresh approach to identification, the results of which strongly support that performance improves under the threat of elimination and does so, but only in part, due to increases in risk taking. Where we can separately identify...

Basketball is one of the most practised sports in the world, especially in America. America has the most famous professional basketball league, the National Basketball Association (NBA). This study examines whether there is a relationship between the physical constitution of professional...

We examine the extent to which participation in high school athletics has beneficial effects on future education, labor market, and health outcomes. Due to the absence of plausible instruments in observational data, we use recently developed methods that relate selection on observables with...

This paper analyses the link between relative market value of representative subsets of athletes in the National Basketball Association (NBA) and individual wages. NBA athletes are categorised with respect to multiple performance characteristics utilising the k-means algorithm to cluster...