International Journal of Sport Finance

I explore the impact of competing in elite-level college football on the institution's financial health by analyzing institutions that reclassified from NCAA Division I Football Championship Subdivision to the Football Bowl Subdivision. I find that this reclassification is associated with increases in applications, first-year enrollment, and total enrollment. While it decreases per student tuition revenue relative to its counterfactual, total revenue increases.

The full impact of the return of fans following the COVID-19 lockdowns on European football referee and player behavior is not well understood. Previous research primarily focused on the impact of total attendance bans on match outcomes in a difference-in-differences approach. Only two papers analyze the impact of the return of fans to matches on match outcomes and neither analyzed multiple seasons following the return of fans. We address these issues by analyzing the return of fans to football matches in the five largest European football leagues before and after games played with no fans in attendance using event study methods that allow for variable impacts over time. We also apply this method to analyze the impact of video assistant referee (VAR) oversight of referee decisions. Results from event study models estimated separately for each league indicate that both events influenced the number of fouls called with substantial heterogeneity across leagues. Fouls called in matches after the return of fans decreased in matches in Italy, the UK, and France and increased temporarily in matches in Germany. The reduction in fouls may reflect post-pandemic changes in public pressure placed on referees and players by fans, perhaps because of the airborne transmission of influenza viruses.

This study examines how superstars affect players’ situational performance in professional men's tennis. We use match-level data from 27,366 main draw Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) singles matches between the 2004 and 2019 seasons. Estimating a high-dimensional fixed effects model, we use ATP serve and return ratings to proxy performance in dominant (serve) and nondominant (return) situations of both higher-ranked (HR) and lower-ranked (LR) players. We provide evidence that HR players deliberately increase/decrease their performance in (non)dominant match situations based on their rank and the timing of facing a superstar in subsequent matches. Similarly, there are differences in the extent of performance shifts induced by superstars among different rank groups for LR players; however, the differences do not extend to different within-match situations.