FiT Publishing

Scholarship has established that characteristics of a firm’s upper echelon affect firm-level outcomes in a range of industries. In professional sport, firms depend on live game attendance and, increasingly, the consumption of online content to generate local revenue. The ability to drive these two revenue streams depends on a franchise’s competencies in marketing, relationship management, and brand building. In this research, we speculate those competencies start at the top, i.e., with ownership. Using upper echelons theory (UET), we hypothesize that franchises with owners who have...Read more

In recent years it has become increasingly popular to exploit the rich data available from sporting contests to obtain insights about important questions within business, finance, and economics. One question, which has been studied extensively using data from primarily soccer teams, is whether managerial turnover affects firm performance. But as in the more traditional literature in finance (e.g., Khanna & Poulsen, 1995; Weisbach, 1988) no clear consensus has been reached thus far.Read more