FiT Publishing

This study analyzes wage discrimination in the Korean Baseball Organization (KBO). Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis was used to analyze panel data covering 775 first-team baseball players, teams’ annual attendance, team records, and home city populations in the KBO from 2001 to 2010. The study results showed that wage discrimination based on nationality occurred in the KBO. Both foreign pitchers and foreign position players were paid significantly higher salaries than South Korean players with similar performance records. We also found that the number of foreign pitchers...Read more

Europe’s professional football clubs engage in intraseasonal races to win the league, qualify for Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) competitions, and avoid relegation. In these competitions, playing talent is a scarce good as players invest effort in the form of fitness and the risk of injuries. Thus, managers face incentives to adjust effort levels by means of changing the value of starting squads. This paper analyzes whether managers save efforts in the absence of financial incentives or ahead of more important games. The theoretical model extends previous papers from the...Read more

This paper analyzes teams’ responses to rule changes designed to encourage more entertaining play in Rugby Union’s Six Nations Championship using a data set of all scores in the competition since its inception in 1883. We find that increasing the value of scoring a try leads to more tries per match, and that this effect increases over time. We also find evidence that teams may be prepared to concede penalties, which are worth fewer points in order to prevent more costly tries. The switch to a winner-take-all format in 1994 and the introduction of professionalism in 1995 also led to more...Read more

This special sssue contains five papers from the 7th European Sport Economics Association (ESEA) Conference on Sports Economics. This conference was hosted by the Center for Research in Sports Administration (CRSA; http://www.crsa.uzh.ch) August 27–28, 2015, at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. On the day prior to the conference, the CRSA organized a PhD course in sport economics. Paul Madden (University of Manchester) held an introductory lecture on theoretical sport economics before Brad Humphreys (West Virginia University) explained various...Read more

This paper analyzes the impact of the French 75% income tax rate on the attractiveness of the French soccer league. The concerns are less about its financial implications for clubs than about the possible decrease in its attractiveness. A classical model of professional team sport leagues is employed to measure the Nash equilibrium competitive balance and the stock of talent to assess the effect of the new taxation. We then propose two hypotheses corresponding to specific situations in the French soccer league: “social and fiscal disparities between clubs” and “sugar daddy” behavior. The...Read more

This paper examines the efficiency of the “in-play” Australian Rules football fixed odds betting market at quarter time, half time, and three quarter time. Tests of semi-strong efficiency are performed on the 2009 AFL season using logistic regression analysis. The results demonstrate that as the match progresses, there is a significant bias against the team that is currently leading—a bias that increases when the team that is leading is also the away-favorite. This bias is shown to yield significant profits utilizing simple betting strategies.Read more

This paper analyzes the changes induced by the newly introduced UCI Pro Tour on the behavior of racing teams. We develop an oligopolistic model starting from the well-known Cournot framework to analyze why the UCI Pro Tour fails to reach its primary aim, namely to increase overall competition among professional cycling teams. In particular we show that the pattern of non-competitive behavior displayed by race teams is the result of a poorly designed Pro Tour licensing assignment procedure. Empirical findings confirm that teams put forth low effort in a high percentage of tour events,...Read more