Stephan Nüesch

TALENT AND/OR POPULARITY: WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO BE A SUPERSTAR?

We show that both talent and popularity significantly contribute to stars’ market values in German soccer. The talent-versus-popularity controversy on the sources of stardom goes back to Rosen (1981) and Adler (1985). All attempts to resolve the controversy empirically face the difficulty of accurately identifying talent. In professional sports, rank-order tournaments help in ascertaining talent. Analyzing a team production setting, we make use of a large number of performance indicators to estimate a player’s talent according to his contribution to the team’s winning chances.

The effect of wage dispersion on team outcome and the way team outcome is produced

The impact of intra-team pay dispersion on team productivity is a highly discussed issue. On the one hand, wage differentials provide incentives for higher employee effort. On the other hand, pay inequality may reduce team cohesiveness and increase feelings of relative deprivation leading to lower performance. Analysing nonlinear effects of wage dispersion in professional soccer, we find empirical evidence that team performance is strongest when there is either very high or very low wage inequality. Medium levels produce the weakest team performance. In addition, we show that the pay structure affects the teams playing style even after controlling for team and coach heterogeneity. We discuss the theoretical and managerial implications as well as the limits of generalization.

The Role of Patriotism in Explaining the TV Audience of National Team Games—Evidence From Four International Tournaments

In the literature addressing the determinants of TV audiences in sports, both the absolute and relative playing strength of the opponents play a prominent role. Regarding national team competitions, however, this study conjectures that patriotism matters as well. Analyzing the Swiss TV audience at 2 World Cups and 2 European Football Championships, this study finds strong evidence that TV ratings are highly affected by the sizes of the groups of foreign residents affiliated with the teams playing on the field.

Mechanisms of Superstar Formation in German Soccer: Empirical Evidence

Abstract Based on the competing theories of superstar formation proposed by Rosen (1981) and Adler (1985) it is controversial if first hand observable talent or other factors like past consumption and popularity influence stardom. This article investigates the emergence of superstars in German soccer. We use data on market values and individual player performance and publicity data to differentiate between Rosens and Adlers theory of superstar formation. Running quantile regressions we find evidence that Adlers theory applies to German soccer stars. Therefore, not only investments in physical talent but also the cultivation of popularity is an adequate strategy for becoming a superstar.

Sentimental Preferences and the Organizational Regime of Betting Markets

We analyze the price impact of sentimental bettor preferences within a bookmaker betting market. Our model demonstrates that, under reasonable assumptions about the nature of demand in a market with strong competition, the bookmaker will offer lower prices for bets with comparatively stronger demand. Using a sample of more than 16,000 English soccer matches we find evidence that more favorable odds are extended to bets on more popular clubs and that this effect is amplified on weekends when sentimental bettors face lower opportunity costs to wager. Our findings help to explain why the market for sports gambling operates as a hybrid structure with bookmakers able to attract a considerable share of the betting volume although identical contracts are traded on exchange markets at lower costs; the organizational design of a quote-driven market enables the dealer to take advantage of sentimental bettor preferences.

Are Multinational Teams More Successful

Teams have become increasingly multinational in many sectors. The impact of national diversity on team performance is, however, controversial. On the one hand, multinational teams may have access to a greater variety of task-relevant expertise, which should increase the team performance. On the other hand, national diversity may complicate team collaboration and increase team conflict. Applying panel econometrics to 4284 team observations in a globalized sector, we find evidence that multinational teams perform worse than teams with less national diversity.

Inter-Market Arbitrage in Betting

We show that a combined bet at the bookmaker and at the bet exchange market yields a guaranteed positive return in 19.2% of the matches in the top five European soccer leagues. Moreover, we find that all considered bookmakers frequently offer arbitrage positions, and that they experience, on average, negative margins from these postings. Our findings indicate that bookmakers set prices not only by optimizing over a particular bet, but also by taking the future trading behaviour of their customers into account. We discuss the implications for the literature on the relationship between betting market structure and informational efficiency.

Specific Human Capital as a Source of Superior Team Performance

We empirically investigate the performance effect of team-specific human capital in highly interactive teams. Based on the tenets of the resource-based view of the firm and on the ideas of typical learning functions, we hypothesize that team members’ shared experience in working together have a positive effect on team performance, but at diminishing rates. When we hold constant a team’s stock of general human capital and other potential drivers, we find support for this prediction. We also discuss the implications concerning investment decisions into human capital as well as the transferability of our findings to other contexts.

Aircraft Noise, Health, and Residential Sorting: Evidence from Two Quasi-Experiments

We explore two unexpected changes in flight regulations to identify the causal effect of aircraft noise on health. Detailed yearly noise metrics are linked with panel data on health outcomes using exact address information. Controlling for individual and spatial heterogeneity, we find that aircraft noise significantly increases sleeping problems, weariness and headaches. Our pooled models substantially underestimate the detrimental health effects, which suggests that individuals self-select into residence based on their unobserved noise sensitivity and idiosyncratic vulnerability. Generally, we show that the combination of fixed effects and quasi-experiments is very powerful to identify causal effects in epidemiological field studies.

Are Demographic Diversity Effects Spurious

The substantial literature on the relationship between demographic diversity and team performance yields weak and/or inconsistent results. Using match-level data of all games played in the German soccer league Bundesliga over six seasons, this paper analyzes age, race and tenure diversity of the fielded team under different model specifications to test the robustness of demographic diversity effects. The empirical results reveal that the correlations between demographic diversity and the outcome of the game are confounded by mean values of the demographic attributes and contextual covariates.