Egon Franck, A comment on the newly revised “2015 version” of the UEFA Club Licensing and Financial Fair Play Regulations, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 362, 2016. (Working Paper)
UEFA has revised its Club Licensing and Financial Fair Play Regulations in June 2015 (new FFP). Based on a conceptual analysis of the main components of new FFP – the Break-Even Requirement (BER), the Fair Market Value Principle (FVP) and the concept of Voluntary Agreements (VA) – this comment arrives to the following main conclusions: New FFP follows old FFP in creating hard budget constraints for football managers and in discriminating against “payroll gifts” and therefore against benefactors that are willing to inject money in exchange for “pure” sporting success. But new FFP is now less vulnerable to the allegation that it discriminates against true entrepreneurs wishing to develop mismanaged football clubs into sustainable businesses. The new concept of Voluntary Agreements (VA)gives them more flexibility to invest, particularly in such environments where quality is only slowly remunerated by the football markets. |
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Helmut Max Dietl, Carlos Gomez Gonzalez, Are women or men better team managers? Evidence from professional team sports, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 364, 2017. (Working Paper)
We empirically compare the performance of female and male team managers. We find that female team managers never perform worse than male team managers and that females work under significantly worse conditions than males. Additionally, we find that specialized experience has no influence. Special- 1 ized experience means having worked previously as an employee in the same industry. Our dataset consists of female and male managers in women soccer leagues acroos countries, viz., France, Germany, and Norway. Managers in team sports usually have exactly the same tasks (selection, coordination, and motivation of team members) as team managers in other industries. The limited number of women in top management positions in some of these industries and the lack of available data do not often allow comparisons. Our study, which includes a fair number of female team managers and a clear measurement of performance, can help understanding stereotypical behaviors. Therefore, our results have important implications for industries, companies, and clubs who oppose employing female team managers. |
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Helmut Max Dietl, Cornel Nesseler, Momentum in tennis: controlling the match, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 365, 2017. (Working Paper)
Although many studies examine if players in sports and especially in tennis bene t from a psychological or physiological boost (momentum) none examine whether the set score as a dependent variable or tournament rounds as independent variables are important determinants when assessing momentum. We empirically investigate whether professional female and male tennis players benefit from momentum. In contrast to previous work, we nd players we find players bene t from momentum as long as they control a match. Once players lose control over a match, they have a signi cantly lower chance to win the next set than their opponent. This loss of control results in what we call anti-momentum. |
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Helmut Max Dietl, Markus Lang, Cornel Nesseler, The impact of government subsidies in professional team sports leagues, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 366, 2017. (Working Paper)
This article develops a game-theoretical model to analyze the effect of subsidies on player salaries, competitive balance, club profits, and welfare. Within this model, fan demand depends on win percentage, competitive balance, and aggregate talent. The results show that if a large market club receives a subsidy and fans have a relatively strong preference for aggregate talent, compared to competitive balance and own team winning percentage, club rofits and welfare increase for both clubs. If the small-market club is subsidized, a small subsidy increases competitive balance and player salaries of both clubs. |
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Kerstin Pull, Birgit Pferdmenges, Uschi Backes-Gellner, Do Research Training Groups Operate at Optimal Size?, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 367, 2017. (Working Paper)
In this paper, we analyze whether structured PhD programs operate at optimal size and whether there are differences between different disciplinary fields. Theoretically, we postulate that the relation between the size of a PhD program and program performance is hump shaped. For our empirical analysis, we use hand-collected data on 86 Research Training Groups (RTGs) funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). As performance indicators, we use (a) the number of completed PhDs and (b) the number of publications by RTG students (PhD students and postdoctoral researchers). Applying DEA with constant and variable returns to scale, we find that the optimal team size varies between 10 and 16 RTG students in the humanities and social sciences. In contrast, our empirical analysis does not uncover a systematic relation between size and performance for RTGs in the natural and life sciences. |
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Maximilian Valentin Rüdisser, Raphael Flepp, Egon Franck, When do reference points update? A field analysis of the effect of prior gains and losses on risk-taking over time, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 369, 2017. (Working Paper)
We study how temporal separations affect recurring decision-making under risk and thus ask when reference points update. Using both experimental and panel data from a casino, we analyze how individual risk-taking behavior during a casino visit depends on the outcomes of temporally separated prior visits. Our results show that small prior gains lead to more risk-averse behavior in the next visit, but small prior losses have no effect on subsequent risk-taking. These results suggest an asymmetric temporal effect of small prior gains and losses, whereby gains affect subsequent choices for longer than losses. Thus, the reference point — which determines subsequent risk-taking behavior — updates much faster after small losses than after small gains. Further, we find that risk-taking greatly depends on the size of prior outcomes. Whereas large prior losses also impact subsequent choices and strongly reduce risk-taking, large prior gains only have a marginal effect, if any. |
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Helmut Max Dietl, Raiffeisen für die Zukunft: Traditionelles Geschäftsmodell für Geschäftsfelder der Zukunft, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 370, 2017. (Working Paper)
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Marc Brechot, Raphael Flepp, Dealing with randomness in match outcomes: how to rethink performance evaluation and decision-making in European club football, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 374, 2018. (Working Paper)
Football is a low-scoring sport in which a few single moments can change the result of an entire match, regardless of what else happened during the 90 minutes on the field. Thus, random forces can have a substantial influence on match outcomes. However, decision makers in European football clubs often rely heavily on recent match outcomes when evaluating team performance, which can lead to systematic misjudgments. In this paper, we propose a complementary approach for performance evaluation aimed at enabling decision makers to substantially mitigate the tendency to overlook the influence of randomness in match outcomes. We build upon the concept of expected goals based on quantified scoring chances and develop a chart that visualizes situations in which a team's true performance throughout a sequence of matches likely deviates from the performance indicated by match outcomes. The insights provided by the chart can systematically alert decision makers of professional football clubs about sensitive situations and should prevent clubs from making flawed decisions when match outcomes are overly biased due to the influence of random forces. |
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Jamie Lee Gloor, Manuela Christina Morf, Samantha C Paustian-Underdahl, Uschi Backes-Gellner, Fix the game - not the dame: a team intervention to restore gender equity in leadership evaluations, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 375, 2017. (Working Paper)
The leadership literature shows consistent, sizeable, and persistent effects indicating that female leaders face significant biases in the workplace compared with male leaders. However, the social identity leadership literature suggests these biases might be overcome at the team level by adjusting the number of women in the team. Building on this work, we conducted 2 multiple source, multiple wave, multi-level randomized field experiments to test if the gender composition of teams helps to restore equity in leadership evaluations of men and women. Across two samples of university students engaged in a team-building exercise, we find that male leaders are rated as more prototypical leaders than female leaders despite no differences in leaders’ self-reported prototypicality; however, this male leadership advantage is eliminated in gender-balanced teams. In Study 2, we extend this finding by supporting a moderated mediation model showing that leader gender and the team’s gender composition interact to relate to perceived trust in the leader, through the mediating mechanism of leader prototypicality. Findings support the social identity model of organizational leadership and indicate a boundary condition of role congruity theory, bolstering our need for a more social relational, context-based approach to leadership. |
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Egon Franck, European club football after "five treatments" with Financial Fair Play - time for an assessment, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 377, 2018. (Working Paper)
UEFA’s Club Licensing and Financial Fair Play Regulations impacted on European club football. After five distinct applications of the break-even requirement, which represents the cornerstone of these regulations, it is time for an assessment. How has the situation in European top-division football changed since the FFP regulation? The most recent financial data show that European club football is characterized by significant financial recovery and further polarization. How has the FFP regulation presumably affected this development? This article discusses plausible reasons why FFP has contributed to financial recovery but has not aggravated polarization. Understanding the drivers of polarization is essential before taking further regulatory steps. |
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Uschi Backes-Gellner, Rankings upon rankings – and no end in sight Discussion of “Quantitative and Qualitative Rankings of Scholars” by Rost and Frey, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 378, 2011. (Working Paper)
Katja Rost and Bruno S. Frey address an important topic. They compare two kinds of rankings, a conventional allegedly "quantitative“ publication ranking, and a ranking based on the membership on editorial boards of academic journals, which they call "qualitative“. They find that the relation between the two rankings is not linear, but inversely u-shaped. Consequently, they argue that maximizing publication rankings may lead to a decline in research quality. Therefore, basing promotion decisions solely on publication rankings could be counterproductive for science and hence should be avoided. |
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Uschi Backes-Gellner, Agnes Bäker, Kerstin Pull, The opportunity costs of becoming a dean: Does leadership in academia crowd out research?, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 379, 2017. (Working Paper)
Researchers in academia typically perform different tasks: research, teaching and services to the scientific community. We analyze the opportunity costs in terms of a potentially reduced publication productivity associated with becoming a dean in the German institutional setting where deans are non-professional expert-leaders who temporarily take the dean position. Theoretically, we distinguish between two different effects that relate deanship and publication productivity: a resource effect where publication productivity during and – as a result of potentially having developed a taste for service –also post deanship decrease as a result of a reduction of the available time for research and a self-selection effect where pre-deanship publication productivity is lower than that of peers who are not about to become dean. Based on a dataset of 1,110 business and economics researchers from German-speaking universities, we find evidence for a resource effect with leadership in academia reducing research productivity during and also post deanship. We find no evidence of a negative self-selection effect in the sense of less successful researchers being more likely to take the position of a dean. Reduced research productivity during and post deanship as compared to those researchers that never became dean is driven by those researchers who become dean in later periods of their career, i.e., presumably by those who deliberately shift their focus away from research and towards a stronger engagement in the scientific community in their late career years. Early career deans, on the contrary, seem to see their deanship more as a transitory role and are able to compensate the reduced resources during deanship, and they also do not suffer from a reduced publication productivity post deanship. |
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Oliver Merz, Raphael Flepp, Egon Franck, Does sentiment harm market efficiency? An empirical analysis using a betting exchange setting, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 381, 2019. (Working Paper)
This paper investigates whether the sentimental preferences of investors influence market efficiency. We use a betting exchange market environment to analyze the influence of sentimental bettors on market efficiency in 2,333 soccer matches played between 2006-2014 during the last three hours of the pre-play period. Contrary to bookmaker markets, there is no intermediary in a betting exchange and, thus, the market prices solely reflect the beliefs of person to person betting. We use three different proxy variables to measure the bettor sentiment and find that price changes are more likely to be inefficient for betting events that are more prone to sentiment. Based on that finding, we propose a trading strategy that generates positive returns before considering the transaction costs and commission fees. Although the returns turn negative after considering the transaction costs and commission fees, the proposed trading strategy still outperforms a random betting strategy. |
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Philippe Meier, Raphael Flepp, Maximilian Valentin Rüdisser, Egon Franck, The advantage of scoring just before the halftime break – pure myth? Quasi-experimental evidence from European football, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 382, 2019. (Working Paper)
We examine whether the moment just before the halftime break is a particularly good time to score a goal. Using detailed data from the top five European football leagues between the 2013/14 and 2017/18 seasons, we exploit the quasi-random occurrence of goals scored just before and just after the halftime break. In the former situation, the game is exogenously inter-rupted by a break immediately after the goal, whereas in the latter situation, the game continues without interruption. We show that in the case of a goal being scored just before halftime, the scoring team benefits more from the halftime break than the conceding team. |
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Philippe Meier, Raphael Flepp, Maximilian Valentin Rüdisser, Egon Franck, Investigating the conditions for psychological momentum in the field : evidence from men’s professional tennis, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 383, 2019. (Working Paper)
We examine how interruptions and personal and contextual factors affect the manifestation of psychological momentum (PM). Using men’s singles tennis point-by-point data from the two Grand Slam tournaments, Wimbledon and Roland Garros, between 2009 and 2014 (N=29,934), we employ realized break points as the potential triggers of PM and rest periods between two sequential games as the exogenous task interruptions. Controlling for player ability and the state of the match, we find that players are more likely to win the next game after realizing a break point only if there is no rest period between games. Thus, our results suggest that interruptions terminate the momentum effect. Further-more, we find that the effect of PM increases for players with a lesser relative ability and at a later stage within a match, showing the importance of personal and contextual factors for PM. |
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David Oesch, Felix Urban, International PCAOB Inspections and Earnings management Transmission within Multinational Business Groups, In: SSRN, No. 3277474, 2019. (Working Paper)
Does the impact of international Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) inspections extend beyond country borders of inspected auditors? We investigate this question by examining multinational business groups. Following initial PCAOB inspections of accounting firms auditing foreign U.S.-listed global ultimate owners, our findings indicate that their international subsidiaries decrease earnings management. Research design choices such as the comparison of treated observations with same country-industry-year control observations and a fixed effects structure that controls for country, industry, year, and group characteristics mitigate concerns of omitted variables. Our paper provides evidence for benefits of international PCAOB inspections over and above the previously documented effects for firms located in the countries of the inspected auditors. |
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Nicolas Schweizer, Helmut Max Dietl, Brand Management Throughout Professional Athletes' Careers, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 350, 2015. (Working Paper)
This paper examines how professional athletes can optimize commercial revenues from endorsement and sponsorship agreements throughout their careers. We use athlete brand management, defined as the balancing of brand building and brand selling activities, to understand the dynamics of commercial revenues optimization. We develop a conceptual framework that consists of two main blocks. First, we investigate four key determinants for the generation of athletes' accumulated commercial revenues. Second, we analyze appropriate brand management strategies at different stages of an athlete's life cycle. We propose a number of contingencies that refer to an athlete's characteristics, situation, and environment and argue that these contingencies determine the appropriate, i.e. revenues-optimizing, brand management strategy of an athlete at any career stage. Examples of professional athletes' brand management strategies support our framework. To our knowledge, this is the first paper to examine athletes' long-term commercial revenues optimization through athlete brand management. |
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Cornel Nesseler, Carlos Gomez Gonzalez, Helmut Max Dietl, Julio del Corral, The role of African Americans in the executive labor market: the case of head coaching in college basketball, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 371, 2017. (Working Paper)
In this paper, we examine how the number of African American and White American coaches in college basketball evolved since 1947. Particularly, we focus on 1973 when the league split up. The separation created asymmetric regulatory requirements. This led to a significant difference in the number of African American coaches. The evidence suggests that less regulated institutions employ fewer African American coaches. The results are time consistent, not clustered geographically, and unrelated to specific institutions. Our results have policy implications for college sports as well as other industries which have similar working conditions. |
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Jose Parra Moyano, Karl Schmedders, Gregor Philipp Reich, Urns filled with bitcoins: new perspectives on proof-of-work mining, In: SSRN, No. 3399742, 2019. (Working Paper)
The probability of a miner finding a valid block in the bitcoin blockchain is assumed to follow the Poisson distribution. However, simple, descriptive, statistical analysis reveals that blocks requiring a lot of time to find — long blocks — are won only by miners with a relatively higher hash power per second. This suggests that relatively bigger miners might have an advantage with regard to winning long blocks, which can be understood as a sort of “within block learning”. Modelling the bitcoin mining problem as a race, and by means of a multinomial logit model, we can reject that the time spent mining a particular block does not affect the probability of a miner finding a valid version of this block in a manner that is proportional to her size. Further, we postulate that the probability of a miner finding a valid block is governed by the negative hypergeometric distribution. This would explain the descriptive statistics that emerge from the data and be aligned with the technical aspects of bitcoin mining. We draw an analogy between bitcoin mining and the classical “urn problem” in statistics to sustain our theory. This result can have important consequences for the miners of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies in general, and for the bitcoin mining community in particular. |
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Nicolas Ettlin, Erich Walter Farkas, Andreas Kull, Alexander Smirnow, Optimal risk-sharing across a network of insurance companies, In: Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper, No. 20-52, 2020. (Working Paper)
Risk transfer is a key risk and capital management tool for insurance companies. Transferring risk between insurers is used to mitigate risk and manage capital requirements. We investigate risk transfer in the context of a network environment of insurers and consider capital costs and capital constraints at the level of individual insurance companies. We demonstrate that the optimisation of profitability across the network can be achieved through risk transfer. Considering only individual insurance companies, there is no unique optimal solution and, a priori, it is not clear which solutions are fair. However, from a network perspective, we derive a unique fair solution in the sense of cooperative game theory. Implications for systemic risk are briefly discussed. |
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