ECASE has a dual research agenda based on the questions what can sports do for economics and what can economics do for sports.
The first research focus of ECASE is to study questions in labour, behavioural, organizational, and health economics through sports data. Sports data is a fruitful ground for economics research, because of the wealth of real-life situations, which are documented in sports but not in other domains of human life. This research agenda has clear links to the research themes of the Department of Applied Economics and wider Erasmus School of Economics.
A second area of specialization for ECASE is the industrial organization of professional sports. Given the industry’s unique features, such as the transfer system, salary caps and revenue sharing, the sports industry raises several unique challenges for competition policy makers. The very first economic analysis of sports, published in 1956 by Simon Rottenberg in the Journal of Political Economy, investigates how regulators should balance the ‘normal’ application of competition policy principles against the objective of protecting the tension in on-field competition. The 2003 Journal of Economic Literature paper by Stefan Szymanski, an affiliate member of ECASE, is a seminal paper in this strand of literature.