Core members
Jan van Ours
As a leading labour and health economist, Jan van Ours is at the heart of the research programme of Erasmus Centre for Applied Sports Economics. Jan is Professor of Applied Economics at Erasmus School of Economics and has published a variety of papers on sports in recent years.
For example, he investigated the link between manager dismissals and team performance, the matching of runners and teams based on past performance and the relationship between age and productivity in a sample of non-professional runners.
Thomas Peeters
Thomas Peeters is an associate professor at the department of Applied Economics of the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE), where he serves as department director.
Thomas studies questions on the intersection of strategy economics, industrial organization, and sports economics. His work on sports has appeared in various high impact journals such as Management Science, Economic Policy and the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization.
Enrico Pennings
Enrico Pennings is professor of applied industrial organization at Erasmus School of Economics.
Enrico is interested in a broad range of strategic decisions made by organizations to improve performance. Many of his publications deal with cross-border topics. For instance, he has analyzed the impact of foreign coaches on the performance of national soccer teams in a paper published in Global Strategy Journal.
Michel van de Velden
Michel van de Velden is an associate Professor of Statistics at the Econometric Institute of the Erasmus University Rotterdam. His main research interests are dimension reduction and cluster analysis methods, with a strong focus on data visualization.
Michel is interested in applying advanced statistical methods in the context of football analytics data. For instance, he analysed methods to evaluate passing in a paper published in the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports.
Sam Hoey
Sam Hoey is an assistant professor at the Erasmus School of Economics. He uses sports data to investigate economic and managerial questions, particularly in industries where relevant data is scarce.
His recent research explores topics such as discrimination and skill transmission in football management. His latest publication, published in Management Science, examines skill diffusion and peer learning in the National Hockey League. During his PhD, he studied worker absenteeism, peer effects, and rehiring decisions using NHL data.”
Affiliate members
Stefan Szymanski
Stefan Szymanski is widely considered to be the leading sports economist worldwide. Stefan is professor of Sports Management at the University of Michigan and he has a part-time affiliation to Erasmus School of Economics.
His popularizing books, e.g. Soccernomics with Simon Kuper, and academic writing, e.g. his 2003 paper in the Journal of Economic Literature, are among the most cited work on sports economics.
Francesco Principe
Francesco Principe is senior assistant professor at the Department of Economics, University of Bergamo. Francesco is interested in the use of original sport data to address both health and labour market issues.
His most recent work uses variation in quality of life and amenities across Serie A clubs’ locations to investigate their role in shaping compensating wage differentials in labour markets populated by superstars, such as the professional football players.