Articles in this issue:

  • Helmut Dietl and Egon Franck

    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

  • Emelie Värja

    This study investigates whether net migration and per capita income growth are affected by successful local soccer or ice hockey teams. Local governments support local professional teams and are often motivated by the alleged positive externalities, which, ultimately, are supposed to enhance the tax base. We estimate spatial panel data models using data from all Swedish municipalities for the 1996–2012 period. Even with this alternative modeling framework, we still find no evidence of a positive relationship between teams in the highest league and the local tax base; we do, however, find...Read more

  • Julia Bredtmann
    Carsten J. Crede
    and Sebastian Otten

    In this article, we propose a new estimation strategy that draws on the variation in the performance between the male and the female national soccer team within a country to identify the effect of gender equality on women’s soccer success. For this, country year fixed effects are used to control for both time-constant and time-variant country specific factors. Our results reveal that within-country differences in our proxies for gender equality explain the international soccer performance of female teams, but have no notable explanatory power for the success of male teams. This suggests...Read more

  • Johannes Orlowski and Pamela Wicker

    This study estimates the monetary value of voluntary coaching in German non-profit sports clubs applying an output-based approach as opposed to previous studies relying on input-based approaches. Using the contingent valuation method, the willingness- to-pay of the beneficiaries (i.e., the club members consuming training sessions) is estimated. Club members across eight different sports were surveyed (n = 1,583). Results show that—depending on the question format—club members place a monetary value of €67.26 (open question), €17.51 (dichotomous choice), and €18.46 (payment ladder) on one...Read more

  • Jaume García
    Cristina Muñiz
    Plácido Rodríguez
    and María José Suárez

    This paper makes a comparative analysis of the determinants of adult sports practice in different types of activities. Specifically, we analyze frequency of participation in walking, individual versus group sports, indoor versus outdoor sports, and sports that require facilities versus sports that do not require them. In the empirical analysis we use the Spanish Time Use Survey 2002–03 and we estimate zero-inflated negative binomial (ZINB) count data models to explain the frequency of sports participation in the previous four weeks. The covariates included are demographic and socioeconomic...Read more

  • Claire Baudouin and Stefan Szymanski

    This paper examines whether increasing the frequency of testing deters athletes from doping. Since data is not available to analyze this problem directly, an indirect approach is required. We use the relationship between testing and Olympic performance to infer the relationship between testing and doping. This requires a variety of assumptions, the most important of which is that doping improves Olympic performance. The results suggest that in some sports, such as track & field (athletics) and wrestling, carrying out more tests does deter athletes from taking drugs. In other sports in...Read more