Articles in this issue:

  • Panagiotis E. Dimitropoulos
    Athanasios Tsagkanos

    The aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of corporate governance quality (namely board size, board independence, managerial ownership, institutional ownership, and CEO duality) on the profitability and viability of European Union’s football clubs over the period 2005-2009. Empirical results documented that corporate governance quality (higher managerial and institutional ownership, increased board size and independence, and the separation of the CEO and chairman roles) leads to greater levels of profitability and viability. Further analysis based on clubs’ profitability and viability...Read more

  • Nicholas M. Watanabe

    While much of the focus on professional sport is divided between North America and Europe, there is a growing need to analyze sport leagues and organizations outside of these two regions. In this paper, the J-League, Japan’s top flight professional soccer league, is the focus of examination through a seasonal attendance model which seeks to test the importance of region and competitive balance in determining demand for attendance. The results of this model indicate that fans are sensitive to competitive balance, confirming the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis. Furthermore, this paper...Read more

  • Allan Maymin
    Philip Maymin
    Eugene Shen

    We analyze a large and comprehensive play-by-play dataset of professional games in the National Basketball Association using tools from financial economics to explore the optimality of strategically idling resources in the face of uncertain future demand. We find that starters ought to be idled by the coach on a “Q+1” basis, meaning that a starter has one more foul than the current quarter, when the future option value is high or the value of the replacement player is high. We use a novel win-probability approach that can be easily extended to other applications.Read more

  • Pamela Wicker
    Christian Weingärtner
    Christoph Breuer
    and Helmut Dietl

    Choosing the legal structure of a sports institution is one of the key decisions that sports managers must make. Using platform theory and property rights theory, this paper shows that the choice of legal structure influences the revenue composition of sports institutions. We hypothesized that member associations should receive higher sponsorship revenues than private firms because their legal structure offers better protection against hold-up for sponsors and also for customers/members, which in turn leads to increased attention for the sponsor. We tested this prediction using...Read more

  • Stefan Kesenne

    In this paper, we derive, based on a simple microeconomic model, under what conditions free-TV can more profitable than pay-TV in sports broadcasting. The most important factors here are the level, not the elasticity, of the demand for televised sports, as well as the advertisers’ willingness to pay. Also the spectators’ aversion to interruptions for advertising can play a role.Read more