The growing economic importance of professional football and the recent fundamental changes in the regulatory regime governing the football players' labor market together with the availability of detailed information on player salaries, transfer fees and contract lengths have convinced an increasing number of economists from all over Europe to devote their attention to the operation of that particular market. The following paper reviews the available evidence on the various dimensions of that market (remuneration, transfers, contracts and mobility) and points out some promising directions for further research.
In this article, we analyze the determinants of individual absenteeism focusing on the “strictness” of employment protection and the “generosity” of sickness benefits. The data come from the “European Survey on Working Conditions” launched in 2000. Due to its coverage (the EU‐14), the data enable us to identify the relative importance of the institutional framework for explaining differences in absence behavior across nations. Our results reveal that, first, employment protection does not influence the number of absence days while sickness benefits increase absenteeism. And, second, the impact of the institutional framework is smaller than that of some individual worker characteristics.
In this paper, we address the problem of sabotage in tournaments with heterogeneous contestants. In a first step, we develop a formal model, which yields the prediction that favorites exert higher productive effort, while underdogs are more tempted to engage in destructive actions (sabotage). This is because favorites have a higher return on productive effort and both types of effort are substitutes. In a second step, we use data from German professional soccer to test this prediction. In line with the model, we find that favorite teams win more tackles in a fair way, while underdog teams commit more fouls.
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