Dennis P. Wilson

Income, leisure and proficiency: an economic study of football performance

The influence of income, across countries, on the proficiency of leisure, as measure by international football achievement is addressed. It is widely concluded that leisure is a normal good, however; little research has been conducted on the influences of efforts to become proficient at a specific leisure activity. While the law of diminishing marginal productivity indicates that leisure proficiency will increase at a decreasing rate with increases in time allocated toward the leisure activity, the second-order effect of income on neither leisure nor leisure proficiency can theoretically be determined. To estimate these effects, an empirical examination of FIFAs World Rankings has been conducted. The results indicate that leisure proficiency on an aggregate level is positively associated with income and increases at a decreasing rate. This subsequently provides evidence that the consumption of leisure on an aggregate level also increases at a decreasing rate with increases in income.

Nationality preferences for labour in the international football industry

This paper tests consumer and co-worker nationalistic preferences by measuring the effect of team nationality composition on fan attendance and overall team quality using professional football teams in the worlds five largest football leagues. Little evidence is found to support the hypothesis that fans or co-workers discriminate based upon the players nationality. Thus, the under-representation of various nationalities can be concluded to originate from a clubs ownership and/or management. These results are similar to the racial bias revealed by English club owners as found by Szymanski and Preston.

When Going in Circles is Going Backward: Outcome Uncertainty in NASCAR

Using data from the 2007, 2008, and 2009 National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) seasons, this article shows that the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis pertains to both race attendance and television audience, with the former only responding to season-level uncertainty and the latter responding to both race-level and season-level uncertainties. Counter to conventional wisdom, the price of gasoline and unemployment were unrelated to the reported level of attendance. Furthermore, NASCAR broadcasts lose audience when competing against other high-interest sporting events and declines in both television ratings and audience size during the NASCAR season were not unique to 2009. Overall, the empirical evidence suggests that declining competitive balance might have been the common factor that reduced both television audiences and race attendance during this period.

NCAA Enforcement and Competitive Balance in College Football

This article investigates the effects of National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) enforcement on the competitive balance of major college football conferences in the context of the standard empirical crime model. Using an unbalanced panel describing 11 major Division IA football conferences from 1953 through 2003, NCAA enforcement efforts, in the form of investigations and probations, and the severity of punishment, measured as the average length of probations imposed, are found to have opposite but not necessarily offsetting effects on competitive balance. Greater levels of enforcement in a conference improve competitive balance. On the other hand, greater severity of punishment reduces competitive balance. The empirical evidence indicates that these changes take approximately five years to be fully dissipated. Overall, the empirical results indicate that, on average, the net effect of NCAA enforcement is an improvement in competitive balance.

Is Advertising a Good or a Bad? Evidence from U.S. Magazine Subscriptions*

This article investigates whether advertising has a beneficial or deleterious impact on the demand for magazine subscriptions. Specifically, we test whether the demand for magazines indicates if consumers consider advertising a “bad” or a “good.” Using data describing 95 U.S. magazines for the years 1996–98 we find that advertising substituted for editorial content reduces both the quantity and price of magazine subscriptions. However, the full impact of additonal advertising on subscription price and quantity is tied to the percentage of a magazine dedicated to advertising. We show how this ambiguity is reflected in the magazines included in our sample.

The Efficiency of the NASCAR Reward System Initial Empirical Evidence

This article reports empirical tests of the hypotheses developed by Peter von Allmen regarding the inefficiency of a nonlinear reward system in NASCAR. Using season level data from 1949 through 2001, we find that there is less than a one-to-one relationship between the concentration of performance and the concentration of dollar rewards, offering support for von Allmen’s sabotage hypothesis. Granger causality tests indicate that performance-points concentration does not Granger cause winnings concentration, and vice versa. This detracts from von Allmen’s cost hypothesis, although not necessarily from his intuition regarding the hypothesis’s validity.

The value of advertising in a magazine bundle

Existing analyses of circulation industries have often postulated that consumers consider advertising to be a “bad,” thereby requiring publishers to subsidize cover price (and thus circulation revenue) with advertising revenues. This paper uses data describing 117 U.S. magazines for the years 1996–1998 to determine the value of advertising in a magazine bundle. For four of five magazine genres, advertising is found to increase average newsstand circulation and newsstand price. These results indicate that advertising is a shift parameter in the newsstand demand for magazines, as opposed to the alternative hypothesis that advertising is a bad that subsidizes cover price.

When Going in Circles is Going Backwards: Outcome Uncertainty and Fan Interest in Nascar

Using data from the 2007, 2008, and 2009 NASCAR seasons, this paper shows that the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis pertains to both race attendance and television audience, with the former only responding to race-level uncertainty and the latter responding to both race-level and season-level uncertainty. Of the other contributing influences, the price of gasoline and the unemployment rate were both unrelated to race attendance during the sample period, counter to conventional wisdom expressed during the declining attendance and ratings of the 2009 season. We also find that NASCAR broadcasts lose audience when competing against other big-interest sporting events and that declines in both television ratings and audience size during the NASCAR season were not unique to 2009, again contradicting conventional wisdom. Overall, the empirical evidence suggests that declining competitive balance might have been the common factor that reduced both television audiences and race attendance during this period.

The decomposition of disturbances to national output of China–the evidence of sectoral and regional shocks

The Chinese government has established policies to promote its industrial sectors and to develop coastal provinces since the late 1978. To investigate the extent and reason the output growth in China has been influenced by these policies, an error-component model is employed to decompose the importance of sectoral and regional shocks to variations in national output. The results show that both sectoral specific shocks common across regions and regional specific shocks common across sectors are important in explaining the disturbance of national output in China. Specifically, sectoral specific shocks consistently explain relatively more disturbance of Chinese output than regional specific shocks do. Our empirical results are somewhat different from Stockman (1988) and Costello (1993), since they show almost equal explanatory power of sectoral and national shocks in accounting for national outputs in OECD countries.

The Long-Run Impacts of the World Cup

We empirically investigate whether there is any statistically and economically meaningful correlation between the success a nation’s soccer team in the FIFA World Cup Finals and that nation’s real per-capita GDP growth. Using an unbalanced panel of countries from 1950 through 2004, we find that, for certain continents, there are non-trivial correlations between the World Cup finals, World Cup success, and real per-capita GDP growth. In Europe, North America, and South America, real per-capita GDP growth declines by approximately one percentage point in the years during which the World Cup Finals occur. Moreover, we find that in Africa, North America, and South America, the further a nation’s team advances in the month-long tournament the further the decline in real per-capita GDP growth. We estimate the contemporaneous impacts of the 2002 World Cup finals on per-capita income and a counterfactual real per-capita GDP series incorporating the varying levels of success in all of the World Cup finals held during our sample period.