Articles in this issue:

• The Flutie Effect: The Influence of College Football Upsets and National Championships on the Quantity and Quality of Students at a University

  Austin F. Eggers

  Peter A. Groothuis

  and Parker T. Redding

  Using a panel study of universities, we find that football success, as measured either by an upset win or winning a national championship, increases applications and enrollment at a university. Surprisingly, we further find that losing an upset game also increases student enrollment numbers. When examining the academic quality of incoming students following one of these events, we encounter mixed results. Our findings indicate that winning a national champion-ship lowers the number of students enrolling at a school from the top 10%, and between the top 10% to top 25%, of their high school...Read more

• Loss Aversion, Reference-Dependent Preferences, and Collective Bargaining Agreements in the National Basketball Association

  Candon Johnson

  The importance of competitive balance in sports leagues provides a negotiation tactic to leagues and owners when negotiating collective bargaining agreements. This paper provides evidence of loss aversion in National Basketball Association (NBA) game attendance across different collective bargaining agreements. Over time, NBA owners have negotiated policies such as salary caps, maximum salaries, and rookie scale salaries among other devices to increase competitive balance. Competitive balance is often a goal of sports leagues in order to increase demand for attendance, but should...Read more

• What Explains Labor’s Declining Share of Revenue in Major League Baseball?

  John Charles Bradbury

  This study explores reasons for the declining share of revenue going to Major League Baseball players. Though the players’ union and team owners have proposed competing explanations, the phenomenon has not received any rigorous academic study. Economic theories for the similar decline of labor share in the macroeconomy provide possible explanations. The ability to estimate baseball players’ marginal revenue products through their performance offers a unique opportunity to examine the role of worker productivity in determining labor’s share of income in general. The analysis indicates that...Read more

• The Value of Olympic Sponsorship: Domestic vs Foreign Sponsoring Firms

  Dean V. Baim

  Levon Goukasian

  Marilyn B. Misch

  This paper examines the impact of Olympic Sponsorship announcements on stock returns for sponsors of the ten Olympic Summer Games held between 1984 and 2020. The paper finds that sponsorship announcements are associated with an average 0.44% impact on returns on the announcement day. This increase translates to a $61 million increase in sponsoring firms’ market value, on average. The study also documents significant differences in the impact of Olympic sponsorship announcements on domestic versus foreign sponsors’ stock returns as well as significant differences on the returns of Olympic...Read more