The change of an individual holding team leadership responsibilities is a frequent and disruptive event in organizations. Such changes might influence the behavior of both the newly appointed leader and the team. In soccer, there is a common expectation that a team`s captain as a formal-transformational leader positively affects sporting performance. Despite this wide believe there is limited empirical prove. We investigate the effects of exogeneous changes of a captain on the individual and the team’s effort and performance as well as outside observers' evaluations. To test our hypotheses, we utilized individual soccer player data (N = 766) from 2,448 Bundesliga games during eight seasons (N = 48,263 player-game observations) and changes in leadership. Yet, we found that neither the newly appointed team captain nor the team itself showed higher objective effort or performance after the succession event. Nevertheless, experts rated the newly appointed team leader as demonstrating superior performance.

When a football team is experiencing a sporting downturn, there are limited short-term options available from the club's management perspective. Building a better-performing squad in the short run is not feasible. Another potential adjustment is to change the team’s head coach. This analogy can be transferred to leaders managing any organization. We focus on the question of which characteristics are attributed to a successful long-term leader. The paper investigates the impact of team performance and individual characteristics of the coach on the coach’s tenure. For this purpose, we use various data from the top five European leagues (first and second division) from the 2012/13 to the 2022/23 season. In order to adequately analyze this impact, we use elaborate competing risk models to identify the effect of cultural differences on various reasons of coach dismissals. The data is gathered at the matchday level and thus obtained a dataset covering 43,985 matchdays. To our knowledge, we are the first to simultaneously examine these effects across ten different European leagues over a decade. Just like the modern cooperation, most football teams consist of employees (players and head coaches) of different cultures producing language barriers which can particularly lead to communication and transaction costs. The unique dataset allows us to include these cultural and linguistic effects that could impact team performance, coach's performance, and ultimately, the coach's tenure.

Identifying, analysing and describing specific labour markets in professional sports is an integral part of sports economics. One increasingly prominent industry is player agents, often perceived as unscrupulous businessmen exploiting their power over players and clubs for personal gain. Despite their financial significance in the multi-billion-dollar business of professional football, representation markets have received little academic attention to date. Initial research has focused on player agents from an institutional and legal perspective or on their impact on player salaries, but there is a demand for research regarding the perspective of player agents themselves. Using a three-part questionnaire, we obtained a substantial sample (N = 465) of all player agents worldwide (N = 7,558). Various OLS-estimations show the impact of specific human capital compared to general human capital on the performance of player agents. Ultimately, we address the question of which skills make a player agent particularly successful in this market.

Economic models of risky choice often treat risk preferences as stable individual attributes. Yet many consequential decisions are made under public scrutiny, time pressure, incomplete knowledge of one’s own relative ability, and externalities for others. This paper studies such a setting using the German television quiz show Gefragt - Gejagt (The Chase) as a naturally occurring, repeated decision environment. After a one-minute performance task, each contestant chooses between a low, baseline, or high monetary offer, trading off prize money against the probability of being eliminated by a professional quiz player. Crucially, this choice is not purely individual: it changes the team’s potential prize pool and affects the subsequent collective final.

We construct a hand-coded contestant-level dataset from publicly available episodes, linking offer menus, individual performance, survival, team composition, decision order, prior eliminations, accumulated team wealth, chaser identity, and observable socio-demographic characteristics. The empirical strategy combines multinomial choice models, episode and chaser fixed effects, and team-state variables with offer choices as certainty-equivalent decisions under skill-dependent uncertainty. This allows the analysis to distinguish three dimensions of risk: individual monetary risk, strategic risk created by the contestant’s position within the team, and social risk arising from the fact that one person’s choice alters the payoff distribution of all remaining players.

Preliminary evidence suggests that risk-taking is not only associated with individual characteristics such as gender and educational background, but also with the evolving social context of the game: later contestants and contestants facing a depleted team make systematically different choices than otherwise similar players at the beginning of the game. These patterns caution against interpreting observed risk-taking as a direct expression of fixed preferences. Instead, they indicate that risk aversion is jointly produced by ability signals, institutional framing, relative performance pressure, and the social structure of the payoff environment.

The paper contributes to behavioral and pluralist economics by extending the game-show literature beyond isolated high-stakes gambles. It uses a non-standard empirical setting to show how risk preferences are enacted in a public, competitive, and socially interdependent environment. In doing so, it bridges behavioral economics, sociology of valuation, and the methodology of real-world preference elicitation.

This study examines how higher education relates to sustainable finance literacy and investment behavior in Germany. Using 1,034 survey responses collected across two main waves, a matched follow-up, and an additional robustness sample of students in higher semesters, we analyze business students’ financial competences and investment choices. OLS, logit, and fractional logit models show that school-based economics exposure and being enrolled in a business major are positively associated with sustainable finance literacy, whereas prior university course participation is not. At the behavioral level, financial knowledge predicts both the likelihood of being an active investor and the share of sustainable investments, while sustainable finance literacy itself does not predict either outcome.

Declining enrollments intensify pressure on universities to enhance attractiveness, with reputation central to study choice. We test whether reputation measures predict labor market performance of alumni using N = 152 observations on top fund managers in the DACH region. The dependent variable is the individual fund outperformance. Predictors capture the fund managers’ educational backgrounds, including individual degrees and quantifiable reputation of the alma mater. Random effects models show moderate positive performance effects of the alma mater’s ranking, negative effects for excellence status and strong effects of business school accreditations. The results imply conventional forms of university reputation under pressure as emergent labor market signals outweigh conventional excellence labels.