ECASE is proud to announce its 9th Workshop on 'Using Sports in Economics and Management Research'. The programme includes interesting presentations by a mix of leading and up-and-coming international speakers. Please join us on 27 February at the Excelsior Stadium.
Programme
Carlos Gomez-Gonzalez: Better the Devil You Know: Managers’ Networks and Their Influence on Hiring, Responsibilities, and Performance
This paper investigates how managers leverage their professional networks (former employees) to influence three key dimensions: hiring, responsibilities, and performance. We use rich transactional data in professional men's and women's football (soccer) in Europe: over 6k coaches, 80k players, and 100k market movements. First, we find that managers rely heavily on their networks for hiring, particularly non-star workers, and at lower costs (based on market valuation). Second, managers give network-hired workers more responsibilities, particularly in the first year. Third, the number of network-recruited workers is significantly positively associated with performance. We discuss generalizability and implications for managers in other industries.
Co-authors: Gwen-Jiro Clochard and Marco Henriques Pereira
Angelos Theodorakopoulos: Unequal Migration
We study the role of skills and their interaction with barriers to migration in the decision to move. These interactions are key to determine the skill composition of the pool of immigrants in different countries. To do so, we use a novel database that documents international and intra-national moves for subjects with different skill levels. The database is unique in the migration literature in its degree of granularity, which allows us to assess the role of skills in amplifying or mitigating existing barriers. Consistent with previous studies, we find that the various barriers to migration, including measures of distance, tend to hamper mobility. But we identify and quantify a novel interaction between those barriers and the level of skills, such that the impact of barriers on migration decreases as the level of skill increases. At higher skill levels, barriers appear to pose little obstacle to the migration of superstars.
Co-authors: Rebecca Freeman, John Lewis, JMC Santos Silva, Stefan Szymanski and Silvana Tenreyro
David Forrest: The importance of match significance for attendances in football leagues
Matches in team sports are usually organised as leagues where there are end-of-season positive and negative prizes such as the championship, playoff qualification, and relegation. Most prior attempts to investigate how the significance of an individual match for these outcomes affects attendance or television ratings have failed to identify an effect. This paper argues that the explanation may be that most studies use ad hoc metrics which fail adequately to capture how important a match is. A recent development is to use metrics more rooted in sport analytics and research based on this approach has supported the notion that the size of the television audience is influenced by how much the match matters in the context of likely seasonal outcomes. Here, we extend the idea by applying it to modelling stadium attendance in four European football leagues. In each case, attendance is elevated as the match becomes more important from the perspective of the home club, whichever prize is considered. Matches which are important to the away club also raise expected attendance if it is a contender for the championship but this is not true for the negative prize of relegation. Implications for organisers of leagues are discussed.
Co-author: Babatunde Buraimo
Jing Guan: Understanding Physical Inactivity in Midlife and Older Adults: Machine Learning Evidence with Economic Implications
Physical inactivity among middle-aged and older adults imposes substantial health and economic costs, yet its underlying drivers remain only partially understood. Physical inactivity risk (PIR) arises from a complex mix of individual, interpersonal, household, and societal factors, but integrated analyses remain limited. This study employs a two-step machine learning approach grounded in a social-ecological framework. Least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (Lasso) reduces 64 candidate predictors across individual, interpersonal, and family domains to 38 key variables, minimizing bias from prior assumptions. Subsequently, a rolling Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) classifier identifies the top 20 factors most strongly associated with PIR, with SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) used to interpret predictor contributions. Findings reveal PIR is shaped by various demographic, socioeconomic, health, and behavioral factors; nonetheless, the decline in social interaction associated with reduced working hours stands out as a significant contributor. This study shows that recent advances in ML can uncover complex, non-linear predictors that conventional methods may overlook. The integration of Lasso and rolling XGBoost provides a robust data-driven framework for identifying key risk factors, offering valuable insights for targeted interventions in aging and urbanizing populations and a generalizable modelling strategy that applied economics researchers can use to analyse participation behaviour, evaluate policy effects, and study multi-dimensional determinants of health and economic outcomes. Link to paper
Co-authors: Nanyu Shi.
Carl Singleton: Round numbers and personal bests as reference points: Evidence from online chess
Co-authors: Michal Kowalik (University of Tübingen) & Tim Pawlowski (University of Tübingen)
Elisa de Weerd: From Intentions to Routines: Evidence from Gym Data
This paper examines how individuals form, maintain, and abandon routines, using administrative gym data from more than two million members of a large-scale gym with locations across five European countries between 2020 and 2022. COVID-19 regulations introduced a mandatory reservation system, generating high-frequency records of the full decision process of reservations, attendance, and cancellations. We focus on short-term behavior by comparing reservations and attendance, and find that about 40% of reservations did not translate into a visit. Controlling for rescheduling behavior, the intention–behavior gap is about 25%. The variation in this gap is driven primarily by within-person fluctuations over time rather than persistent differences across individuals. We also use exogenous COVID-related gym closures to study how routines respond to shocks. These results provide insights into the micro-dynamics of routine formation, the role of day-to-day fluctuations in undermining planned behavior, and the behavioral patterns that support a rapid recovery of routines when external shocks occur.
Co-authors: Simon van der Zandt, Koen van der Swaluw, and Sven Nolte
Location
Excelsior Stadium Woudestein
Address: Honingerdijk 110, 3062 NX Rotterdam
Registration
Participation in the workshop is open to all interested parties, including academics, students, journalists, and industry stakeholders. Participation is free of charge but registration is compulsory. You will receive a confirmation of your registration.
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See also
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- More information
The ECASE team
Jan van Ours, Thomas Peeters, Enrico Pennings, Michel van de Velden- Related links
- Erasmus Centre for Applied Sports Economics (ECASE)
