nep-spo New Economics Papers
on Sports and Economics
Issue of 2015‒01‒03
two papers chosen by
João Carlos Correia Leitão
Universidade da Beira Interior

  1. The effect of football matches on crime patterns in Barcelona By Simon Planells Struse; Daniel Montolio
  2. All-Star or Benchwarmer? Relative Age, Cohort Size and Career Success in the NHL By Bryson, Alex; Gomez, Rafael; Zhang, Tingting

  1. By: Simon Planells Struse; Daniel Montolio
    Abstract: Given the actual debate, in many European countries, about the need for public administrations to raise their revenues through taxing the crime externalities generated by some private leisure activities, this article analyzes the effect of football matches on crime focusing both on property crimes and interpersonal violent crimes. Our aim is to determine up to what extent a private leisure activity, such as football matches, induces negative crime externalities to the whole society. Using data on both football matches played by Football Club Barcelona (FCB) and geocoded recorded crime data for the City of Barcelona, we firstly evaluate, by means of an Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis (ESDA) at a census tract level, the effect of the number of attendees to football matches on crime by comparing crimes occurring during home and away matches. Secondly, we focus on the effect on the spatial distribution of crime when holding football matches by means of a negative binomial regression. The results regarding property crimes indicate an increase of the number of crimes for the whole city of Barcelona and, specially, in those census tracts that are up to 1 km away from the stadium, indicating that even though there exists a large increase in the number of police officers around the stadium, potential offenders are attracted to crowds where the rewards are higher and the probability of apprehension is lower. These results are confirmed by the low number of recorded crimes on away football matches on the census tracts around the stadium. Regarding violent interpersonal crimes, we find a similar spatial pattern than for property crimes although the overall impact for the whole city is not significant. This result suggests that there exists an important displacement effect towards the census tracts close the FCB stadium.
    JEL: R10 L83
    Date: 2014–11
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wiw:wiwrsa:ersa14p1606&r=spo
  2. By: Bryson, Alex (National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR)); Gomez, Rafael (University of Toronto); Zhang, Tingting (University of Toronto)
    Abstract: We analyze the performance outcomes of National Hockey League (NHL) players over 18 seasons (1990-1991 to 2007-2008) as a function of the demographic conditions into which they were born. We have three main findings. First, larger birth cohorts substantially affect careers. A player born into a large birth cohort can expect an earnings loss of roughly 18 percent over the course of an average career as compared to a small birth cohort counterpart. The loss in earnings is driven chiefly by supply-side factors in the form of excess cohort competition and not quality differences since the performance of players (as measured by point totals for non-goalies) is actually significantly greater for players born into large birth cohorts. Performance-adjusted wage losses for those born in large birth cohorts are therefore greater than the raw estimates would suggest. Second, career effects differ by relative age. Those born in early calendar months (January to April) are more likely to make it into the NHL, but display significantly lower performance across all birth cohorts than later calendar births. In short, those in the top echelon of NHL achievement are drawn from fatter cohorts and later relative age categories, consistent with the need to be of greater relative talent in order to overcome significant early barriers (biases) in achievement. We find league expansions increase entry level salaries including the salaries of those born into larger birth cohorts, but they do not affect salaries of older players. Finally we find that the 2004-05 lockout appears to have muted the differentials in pay for large birth cohort players relative to their smaller birth cohort counterparts.
    Keywords: age, cohort size, performance, salaries, career, NHL
    JEL: J1 J24 J31
    Date: 2014–11
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp8645&r=spo

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