The Flutie Effect: The Influence of College Football Upsets and National Championships on the Quantity and Quality of Students at a University
Austin F. Eggers, Peter A. Groothuis, Parker T. Redding
Using a panel study of universities, we find that football success, as measured either by an upset win or winning a national championship, increases applications and enrollment at a university. Surprisingly, we further find that losing an upset game also increases student enrollment numbers. When examining the academic quality of incoming students following one of these events, we encounter mixed results. Our findings indicate that winning a national champion-ship lowers the number of students enrolling at a school from the top 10%, and between the top 10% to top 25%, of their high school…
This study explores reasons for the declining share of revenue going to Major League Baseball players. Though the players’ union and team owners have proposed competing explanations, the phenomenon has not received any rigorous academic study. Economic theories for the similar decline of labor share in the macroeconomy provide possible explanations. The ability to estimate baseball players’ marginal revenue products through their performance offers a unique opportunity to examine the role of worker productivity in determining labor’s share of income in general. The analysis indicates that…

The Value of Olympic Sponsorship: Domestic vs Foreign Sponsoring Firms
Dean V. Baim, Levon Goukasian, Marilyn B. Misch
This paper examines the impact of Olympic Sponsorship announcements on stock returns for sponsors of the ten Olympic Summer Games held between 1984 and 2020. The paper finds that sponsorship announcements are associated with an average 0.44% impact on returns on the announcement day. This increase translates to a $61 million increase in sponsoring firms’ market value, on average. The study also documents significant differences in the impact of Olympic sponsorship announcements on domestic versus foreign sponsors’ stock returns as well as significant differences on the returns of Olympic…Read more