In an e¤ort to stimulate a more exciting and entertaining style of play, the National Hockey Association (NHL) changed the rewards associated with the results of overtime games. Under the new rules, teams tied at the end of regulation both receive a single point regardless of the outcome in overtime. A team scoring in the sudden-death 5-minute overtime period would earn an additional point. Pri...

Do Former College Athletes Earn More at Work? A Nonparametric Assessment This paper investigates how students’ collegiate athletic participation affects their subsequent labor market success. It uses newly developed distributional tests to establish that the wage distribution of former college athletes is significantly different from non-athletes and that athletic participation is a significant...

In sport and education contexts, children are divided into age-groups which are arbitrary constructions based on the admission dates. This age-group system is thought to determine differences in maturity between pupils within the same group, that is, relative age (RA). In turn, these within-age-group maturity differences produce performance gaps, that is, relative age effects (RAE), which might...

Fatigue and Team Performance in Soccer: Evidence from the FIFA World Cup and the UEFA European Championship We investigate the role of fatigue in soccer (football). Although this issue is important for the “productivity” of players and the optimal organization of national and international championships, empirical evidence is lacking. We use data on all the matches played by national teams in a...

Technological innovations in inventory, logistics, and sales give grocery chain stores a profitability advantage over old-fashioned local stores. With chain stores advancing, local store incumbents gradually exit. Two questions concerning this creative destruction process are central to competition policy. How do chain stores make entry decisions? How does a chain store’s entry impact incumbent...

Sabotage in Tournaments: Evidence from a Natural Experiment Many tournaments are plagued by sabotage among competitors. Typically, sabotage is welfare-reducing, but from an individual’s perspective an attractive alternative to exerting positive effort. Yet, given its illegal and often immoral nature, sabotage is typically hidden, making it difficult to assess its extent and its victims. Therefo...

This paper investigates residents’ preferences of investment in cruise tourism, taking its externalities into full account. The research involved data collection in the port of call of Messina (Sicily, Italy), during the peak cruise season in 2011. A mixed generalized ordered logit analysis, based upon a correspondence analysis, is run to examine what factors influence residents’ perceptions ab...

In a lively, provocative article, DeVany claims inter alia that the size distribution of home runs follows a continuous ‘‘power law’’ distribution which is nested in a larger class of ‘‘stable’’ statistical distributions characterized by an infinite variance. He uses this putative fact about the size distribution of home runs to argue that concern about the use of steroids to enhance home run a...

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball tournament qualifies as a sports mega-event, and cities across the United States compete vigorously with one another to host what is, by most measures, the premier intercollegiate sporting event in the United States. The promise of substantial economic impact has convinced cities to “invest” substantial sums of money to meet the dem...