Visiting Researchers / Guests

Babatunde Buraimo, University of Liverpool

PhD Seminar: Football Analytics using STATA

Paper Presentation: Unscripted Drama: The impact of Surprise, Suspense and Shock on TV Audiences for Football

Dr Babatunde Buraimo is a Senior Lecturer in Sports Management. He was educated at the University of Sheffield and Lancaster University, where he holds a doctoral degree in economics. Dr Buraimo specialises in sports management and economics and has published extensively on the economics of sports broadcasting, demand for sports, and economics of sports participation. In addition, Dr Buraimo takes a keen research interest in the economics of football. On matters specific to football, his publications include research on the economics of corruption, competitive balance in professional team sports, television audience and stadium demand, and football statistics.  Currently, Dr Buraimo is conducting research in the areas of sports migration, the financial history of English football, uncertainty of outcome in sports, and sports betting.

Dennis Coates, University of Maryland

PhD Seminar: Econometric Analyses of Demand

Paper Presentation: Does experience matter: teams' salary distribution, coach experience and team performance. The evidence from MLS

Dennis Coates is Professor of Economics at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is the Book Review Editor for the Journal of Sports Economics and on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Sport Finance and the Journal of Sport Management. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Maryland, College Park and was on the faculty of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill before moving to UMBC in 1995. His work focuses on political economy and public policy issues with emphasis on sport and sports economics topics.

Jaume García-Villar, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona Graduate School of Economics

PhD Seminar: Applied Microeconometrics

Presentation: eSports: profile of participants,complementarity with sports and its perception as sport. Evidence from sports video games

Download: Presentation (PDF, 1 MB) | Working Paper

Jaume Garcia-Villar is professor at UPF, researcher at the Center for Research in Health and Economics (CRES), and Barcelona GSE Affiliated Professor. His experience in the world of research focuses on applied microeconometrics, labour, sport and health economics, and the real estate market. In these areas, he has published over 100 articles and book chapters. These include studies for the Government of Catalonia on the Catalan and the Spanish economies. He was director of the School of International Trade between 1995 and 2005 and president of the National Statistics Institute between 2008 and 2011. Currently, he sits on the editorial board of the journal Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy. Professor Garcia-Villar has been appointed a member of the European Statistical Governance Advisory Board (ESGAB) for 2018-2021. The European Statistical Governance Advisory Board is one of the governing bodies of the European Statistical System (ESS). Its purpose is to improve its independence, integrity and responsibility, key provisions of the body’s Code of Practice. It also aims to improve the quality of European statistics. Among others, each year it draws up a report for the European Parliament and Council on the implementation of the Code of Practice for Eurostat. It is composed of seven members who are chosen from among professionals with exceptional skills in the field of statistics..

Brad Humphreys, University of West Virginia

PhD Seminar: Topics in Quantitative Research Methods in Sports Economics

Brad R. Humphreys is a native West Virginian and WVU alumni. He holds a BS in Business Administration and a BS in Economics from the WVU College of Business and Economics and an MA and PhD in economics from the Johns Hopkins University. He is a professor of economics in the College of Business and Economics. He previously held positions on the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Alberta, and the University of Maryland-Baltimore County.
He is the 2016-17 Benedum Distinguished Scholar in Social and Behavioral Sciences at WVU.
His research on the economics and financing of professional sports and the economics of gambling has been published in academic journals in economics and policy analysis, including the Journal of Urban Economics, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, the Journal of Regional Science, the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Empirical Economics, Public Finance Review, and Regional Science and Urban Economics. He has published more than 100 papers in peer-reviewed journals in economics and public policy. He is the co-editor of the three volume The Business of Sport, a comprehensive examination of sports business, economics, and finance which was named an Outstanding Business Reference Source by the Business Reference Sources Committee of the American Library Association.
He is Editor-in-Chief of Contemporary Economic Policy, a general interest economics journal and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Sports Economics, the International Journal of Sport Finance, the International Journal of Sport Management and Marketing, and International Gambling Studies.
He twice testified before the United States Congress on the economic impact of professional sports teams and facilities. He has also testified before the Massachusetts legislature and Washington DC City Council on the financing of sports facilities. In 2014 he co-authored a report with economists from the Brattle Group for the Governor’s Office of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts evaluating taxpayer liabilities associated with hosting the 2024 Olympic Games; the Boston 2024 Olympic Bid was terminated shortly after the report was issued.

Michael Lechner, University of St. Gallen

Paper Presentation: Mozart or Pelé? The Effects of
Teenagers’ Particiapation in Music and
Sports

Michael Lechner works as professor of Econometrics at the University of St. Gallen since 1998. In 1994, he received his PhD in Economics and Econometrics at the University of Mannheim. He co-heads the Swiss Institute for Empirical Economic Research (SEW). He is interested in the evaluation of labor market programmes, sports economics, and the development of microeconometric methods for causal inference and their link to machine learning. He has published in the Journal of Econometrics, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Journal of the European Economic Association, the European Economic Review, and the Journals of Labor Economics, of Health Economics and of Human Resources among many others. He is a Fellow of the German Academy of Science Leopoldina (Halle), and the Center for Economic Policy Reseach (CEPR, London).

Paul Madden, University of Manchester

PhD Seminar: Topics of the Economic Modelling of Professional Team Sports

Paul Madden is professor emeritus at the University of Manchester. His general research area is applied economic theory. Initial interests in stability and money in general equilibrium theory (1970’s) gave way to research in disequilibrium macroeconomic theory (1980’s). In the last 15 years his interests have focused more on microeconomics than on macroeconomics, specifically; public and welfare economics in general and the economics of crime and corruption in particular, imperfect competition including oligopsony/oligopoly and Hotelling and Salop models of product differentiation and location with special focus on the retail sector, oligopsony and oligopoly, and industrial organisation. Since 2010, the economics of professional sports leagues has become his major area of research activity.

Giambattista Rossi, Birkbeck College University of London

Paper Presentation: Diversity in Italian Football

Dr Giambattista Rossi joined the Department of Management, Birkbeck College, as a Lecturer in Management in September 2014, where he is responsible for a course module on sport labour markets.
Previously, he studies for his undergraduate degree in economics at the Universita’ Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan before completing an MSc in Sport Studies at the University of Stirling, Scotland. He was awarded his PhD in Management at Birkbeck College, University of London, where his research focused on the economic value of professional football players.
From 2012 to 2014 he held the position of Senior Lecturer in Sport Management at the University of East London (UEL) where he was also director of the postgraduate programme in sport management.
Giambattista’s main research interest is in the area of labour markets in professional sport. In particular, he investigates the role of sport agents, third party ownership in football, athletes’ remuneration and their economic value, team performance and individual athletes’ contract duration. He has been involved in a number of research projects looking at football players’ transfer market and third party ownership in football.

Rob Simmons, University of Lancaster

PhD Seminar: Sports Labor Markets

Paper Presentation: Special Ones? The Effect of Head Coaches on Football Team Performance

Rob Simmons is a Lecturer in Economics. He was educated at University of Warwick and University of Manchester and holds a doctorate from University of Leeds. Dr Simmons specialises in labour economics and sports economics. He has published on theoretical and empirical aspects of labour economics, covering areas such as union bargaining over working time, demand-side analysis of working time and efficiency wage models including adverse selection and shirking behaviour. He has been engaged as a consultant to the International Labour Organisation. Dr Simmons is a member of the European Association of Labour Economists and he has presented several papers at their annual conference. Currently, Dr Simmons is pursuing interests in personnel economics, including the impact of changing human resource management practices on the labour market. Dr Simmons also has an international reputation as a sports economist. He has researched into several topics in sports economics, many of which have a labour market focus. He has published pioneering papers on attendance demand in football using a travel cost methodology, on football transfer markets using a sample selection model and on salary determination in Italian football using a rarely published data set. He is currently working on several topics in sports economics, including a new theoretical model of sports league behaviour, economic analysis of sports broadcasting, the labour market for players in the US National Football League and further analysis of earnings in Italian football. Dr Simmons is a member of the editorial board of Journal of Sports Economics. He was also recently a co-convenor of the ESRC financed Sports, Arts and Leisure Economics Study Group. Outside work, Rob is married with two children and his leisure interests include cinema, travel, keeping fit and football refereeing.

Pamela Wicker, German Sport University Cologne

PhD Seminar: Academic Writing and Publishing

Pamela Wicker studied Sport Sciences with a Major in Economics and Management at the German Sport University Cologne where she was awarded a PhD in 2009. From 2011 to 2012 she was employed as a Senior Lecturer at Griffith University, Australia. On her return to the German Sport University Cologne, she earned her Habilitation in October 2013 and the associated title of ‘Private Lecturer’ (PD) in January 2014. Pamela’s research interests are in the areas of sport economics, sport finance, and sport management. Specifically, she looks at resources of sport clubs, participation in sport and physical activity, labor markets in sport, sport consumer behavior, and monetary valuation of intangibles. Pamela is Associate Editor (Economics) and Social Media Editor of Sport Management Review, serves on the Editorial Board of another four journals (Journal of Sport Management, International Journal of Sport Finance, Managing Sport and Leisure, Journal of Sport & Tourism), and referees articles and research proposals for a wide range of international journals and organizations. Currently, Pamela is the Youth Development Officer of the European Sport Economics Association (ESEA).