the role of multilateral institutions in international trade cooperation the world trade organization wfo lacks the power to directly enforce agreements it is therefore important to understand what role the wto can play to facilitate international cooperation and whether a multilateral institution can offer distinct advantages over a web of bilateral agreements this paper examines two potential benefits of a multilateral trade institution first verifying violations of the agreements and informing third parties thus facilitating multilateral reputation mechanisms second promoting multilateral trade negotiations rather than a web of bilateral negotiations the model suggests that a multilateral approach is particularly important when there are strong imbalances in bilateral trading relationships

equilibrium valuation of natural resources the purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretical investigation of equilibrium spot and futures price behavior in a nonrenewable commodity market the underlying commodity is nonrenewable in the sense that the reserve level of the commodity is expected to decline over time in the absence of successful discoveries of additional reserves i wish to understand how the nonrenewable nature of the commodity influences the intertemporal extraction of the commodity equilibrium spot price behavior and the prices of derivative assets traded on the nonrenewable commodity there is considerable disagreement among economists whether resources are exhaustible in the sense of resource constraints becoming binding on our society in the foreseeable future some economists have argued that natural resources are being depleted at

forward and futures contracts as preharvest commodity marketing instruments empirically significant differences between forward and futures contracts evidence their imperfect substitutability as preharvest marketing instruments certain combinations of market conditions make the two types of contracts complementary rather than interchangeable forwards and futures differ conceptually because of lumpiness marking to market and basis of these differences basis constitutes the most important factor although lumpiness may affect smaller producers it represents an inconsequential detail for larger traders in given years interest income cost resulting from futures margin requirements may reach important absolute amounts relative to size of basis and price changes this factor fails to attain a magnitude of practical significance

discriminatory tariffs and international negotiations abstract recent research has highlighted the efficiency of the mfn principle within the gatt wto structure this paper analyzes the exception made to mfn within article xxiii that allows discriminatory punishment for deviations from the agreement we argue that in the absence of collusion the mfn exception reduces the severity of punishment and thus lowers the level of cooperation that can be achieved by the agreement however discriminatory punishment may still be beneficial as we show that it reduces the problems associated with the potential for renegotiation during the punishment phase finally we argue that our results are also applicable to the question of whether to use trade policy sanctions as a means of enforcing agreements covering domestic policies

demand for football and intramatch winning probability an essay on the glorious uncertainty of sports the aims of this study are i to identify the main determinants of the demand for french premiere division football matches using all matches played during the 1997 1998 season ii to estimate a team specific probability of success and iii to propose an updating process for the intramatch winning probability the methodology is tested empirically over an out of sample data set using matches of the 1998 1999 season the results show that football appears to be an inferior product affected by both socio economic and football variables and that the main football variables have only a tenuous explanatory power concerning the final outcome of a given match

optimal tariff equilibria with customs unions the authors construct a model of customs unions in which countries charge optimal tariffs customs unions internalize the externality that exists whenever two countries import the same good also customs unions make several countries into one large unit with more market power big customs unions can improve their members welfare relative to the free trade the authors model of customs unions separates the effects of tariff reduction from the effects of policy coordination the movement from nash equilibrium to a free trade association improves global resource allocations moving from a free trade association to a full customs union has ambiguous resource allocation effects

interest rates and metal price movements further evidence abstract we offer a theory about the relationship between interest rates and metal price movements the theory is a version of the hotelling rule eq 8 the results obtained from prices of four different metals based on seasonally and unadjusted quarterly data over the period 1968 2 1982 2 suggest that a reformulated hotelling rule which has a dynamic structure can explain the relationship between metal prices and interest rates in view of this result it appears that the return on exhaustible resources is related to changes in rather than the levels of interest rates this result also confirms the results of g m heal and m m barrow rev econom stud 48 161 181 1979 econom lett 7 95 103 1981

demand for sport this article reviews international literature on the demand for professional sport the first part presents a conceptual framework for understanding the sources and determinants of the demand for professional sporting contests the second part reviews empirical evidence on key determinants of attendance at sporting events and on other sources of demand such as broadcasting sponsorship and merchandising the review concludes that there is still much to be learned about demand for professional sport and that there are no simple lessons to be drawn from existing literature but important messages do emerge from studies of demand for attendance with regard to effects of uncertainty of outcome quality of contest and quality of viewing copyright 2003 oxford university press

competitive balance measures in sports leagues the effects of variation in season length appropriate measurement of competitive balance is a cornerstone of the economic analysis of professional sports leagues we examine the distributional properties of the ratio of standard deviations rsd of points percentages the most widely used measure of competitive balance in the sports economics literature in comparison with other standarddeviation based measures simulation methods are used to evaluate the effects of changes in season length on the distributions of competitive balance measures for different distributions of the strengths of teams in a league the popular rsd measure performs as expected only in cases of perfect balance if there is imbalance in team strengths its distribution is very sensitive to changes in season length this has important implications for comparisons of competitive balance for different sports leagues with different numbers of teams and or games played jel l83 d63 c63

consumption benefits of national hockey league game trips estimated from revealed and stated preference demand data this paper examines the demand for hockey game trips among metropolitan and nonmetropolitan residents of alberta canada using data on both revealed and stated preference game trip behavior from a telephone survey conducted throughout alberta we estimate the effect of ticket prices team quality arena amenities and capacity on the latent demand for national hockey league hockey games we nd that lower ticket prices higher team quality and additional capacity encourage attendance in the status quo scenario consumer surplus per game is 50 for those who had attended hockey games and about 50 less for those who had not attended games exploiting the stated preference data we develop a number of other consumer surplus estimates we also include travel costs in the estimation of the demand function and estimate the full value of the game trip considering both ticket prices and travel costs sold out arenas in calgary and edmonton generate annual consumption bene ts of 40 and 35 million when only ticket prices are used to calculate consumer surplus i e excluding travel costs considering the full price consumer surplus for the calgary flames of 103 per game trip the annual consumption bene ts may be as high as 82 million jel r22 l83 d61

on the optimal realignment of a contest the case of college football this article examines the relationship between demand and scheduling in college football we first derive two different metrics for team quality and then use those metrics to see how they impact attendance we find that there is a positive interaction between the quality of the teams then various simulations are run to see how attendance would change under different scheduling scenarios if teams are put into conferences based on the team quality measures the average per game attendance only rises 1 2 this is true if 1 year or 10 year quality measures are used however our simulation suggests that this effect would be more than offset mainly because schools with larger capacity would play fewer home games and so aggregate attendance would fall we discuss whether this effect would be mitigated by capacity adjustments in the longer term jel l83 z20 c78

a note on uncertainty and the hotelling rule abstract in this paper we derive the hotelling rule of optimal natural resource depletion modified to account for uncertainty in rates of return it is shown that in the presence of risk aversion the rule implies that the expected equilibrium rate of increase of net resource price must equal the expected rate of interest if and only if there exists a zero covariance between the marginal utility of consumption and the difference between the rate of net price increase and the rate of interest the sign of this covariance is an empirical question as an example illustrates

the mfn clause welfare and multilateral cooperation between countries of unequal size abstract this paper analyzes mfn in a competing exporters model of trade between three countries with unequal endowments and shows that mfn yields higher aggregate welfare than tariff discrimination even as it makes low income countries worse off furthermore in a repeated game of tariff cooperation multilateral free trade is easier to sustain under mfn punishments relative to discriminatory ones this conclusion holds even when tariff discrimination takes the form of bilateral trade agreements overall the analysis shows that from the viewpoint of low income countries mfn and multilateral tariff cooperation are complementary in nature

speculative intensity and spot and futures price variability this paper develops a simultaneous stochastic rational expectations model of futures and spot price determination using the model we find that increases in what we term speculative intensity increase spot price variability arising from storage cost shocks but decrease spot price variability arising from demand shocks in contrast increases in speculative intensity unambiguously decrease futures price variability regardless of the underlying source of disturbances we are able to develop these comparative static results because the model has a unique equilibrium

a theory of managed trade this paper proposes a theory that predicts low levels of protection during periods of normal trade volume coupled with episodes of special protection when trade volumes surge this dynamic pattern of protection emerges from a model in which countries choose levels of protection in a repeated game facing volatile trade swings high trade volume leads to a greater incentive to defect unilaterally from cooperative tariff levels therefore as the volume of trade expands the level of protection must rise in a cooperative equilibrium to mitigate the rising trade volume and hold the incentive to defect in check copyright 1990 by american economic association

futures markets price stabilization and efficient exploitation of exhaustible resources markets for natural resource futures contracts and cash forward contracts experience a rapid growth according to theory this should result in more efficient resource depletion implying that price formation is more consistent with hotelling s rule the rationale of this stabilization effect is briefly discussed next we analyze the impact of expanding futures markets on the behaviour of individual resource owners trading on the cash market using a simple pulse extraction model we demonstrate that the expected time of depletion can shift to the present or the future and that utility of exploitation can go up or down as market prices are stabilized

uncertainty of outcome or strengths of teams an economic analysis of attendance demand for international cricket a significant body of theoretical literature has argued that popular interest in sporting contests between teams is heavily influenced by how difficult it is to predict the result ex ante empirical research has however been unable to reach a consensus on the magnitude of uncertainty of outcome on demand in this article we seek to resolve this impasse by distinguishing between uncertainty of outcome in the short run and uncertainty of outcome in the long run we also show that it is important to control for the independent effect of absolute team strength when testing the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis using data on over 380 test cricket matches played in england australia and new zealand since 1980 we find that short run uncertainty of outcome has a significant impact on attendance demand and that absolute team strength has better explanatory power for attendance demand than does long run uncertainty of outcome our results suggest some policy implications for the management and organization of international cricket

the demand for semi pro league football in malaysia 1989 91 a panel data approach this article arguments the literature on the demand for professional team sports by estimating a demand function for attendance at home matches in the malaysian semi pro football league mspfl between 1989 and 1991 a single equation demand attendance function based on a pooled cross section and time series panel data set of 399 games is estimated by ordinary least squares a fixed effects dummy variable covariance model and an error components model our findings confirm the importance of market size and championship prospects for the home team but not the visiting team as well as divisional status and star players the first match of the season and derby matches also increased attendance

our fans in the north the demand for british rugby league this paper reports the results of estimating a single equation model of an attendance function for british rugby league over the seasons 1982 83 to 1990 91 the data are panel data covering virtually every team which played in the two division league over the nine year time period diagnostic tests indicate that the appropriate model is a semilog random effects model where the dependent variable is league attendance weighted by population the major results are as follows there are significant positive relationships between league attendance and various measures of team success although the direction of causality is moot team quality as proxied by the two divisions and the economic quality of team location as proxied by the unemployment rate but there is no discernible relationship between league attendance and either success in nonleague trophy competitions or measures of exceptional player quality

gatt a cooperative equilibrium in a noncooperative trading regime abstract as global tariff rates have fallen the use of nontariff barriers to trade have become more prevalent one incentive for a country to depart from free trade is to levy the optimal tariff in order to maximize domestic welfare the gatt was designed to maintain free trade through a system of managed retaliation as is well known in a game theoretic trade model of tariffs with no uncertainty free trade is an equilibrium outcome however with the introduction of uncertainty and asymmetric information it is shown that the equilibrium outcome s has each country imposing nontariff barriers to trade

income inequality competitive balance and the attractiveness of team sports some evidence and a natural experiment from english soccer this chapter examines the relationship between financial inequality competitive balance and attendance at english professional league soccer it shows that while financial inequality among the clubs has increased competitive balance has remained relatively stable and match attendance appears unrelated to competitive balance a clearer test of the relationship is suggested by comparison with fa cup matches because income inequality is primarily driven by inter rather than intradivisional inequality the fa cup has been a much more unbalanced competition than the divisional championships attendance at fa cup matches relative to the corresponding league matches has fallen over the last 20 years

implementing partial tax harmonization in an asymmetric tax competition game with repeated interaction this paper investigates the conditions under which partial harmonization for capital taxation is sustained in a repeated interactions model of tax competition when there are three countries with heterogenous capital endowments we show that regardless of the structure of the coalition i e full or partial tax coordination whether partial tax harmonization is sustainable or not crucially depends on the extent to which the capital endowment of the medium sized country is similar to that of the large or small country the most noteworthy finding is that the closer the capital endowment of the median country is to the average one the less likely the tax harmonization including the median country is to prevail and the more likely the partial tax harmonization excluding the median country is to prevail we also show that partial tax harmonization makes the member countries of the tax union better off and non member countries worse off which stands in sharpe contrast with previous studies such as konrad and schjelderup 1999 and bucovetsky 2009

the demand for english league football a club level analysis a demand equation is estimated for 19 large urban based english football league clubs over the period 1962 3 to 1991 2 in order to analyse the economic determinants of club attendances while controlling for football specific factors attendances are measured with and without correction for admission of season ticket holders using an error correction specification to model attendances it is shown that both adjusted and unadjusted attendances respond to real ticket prices in the long run in 17 and 18 clubs respectively the price elasticity is typically larger for adjusted attendances suggesting that casual spectators are more price sensitive than season ticket holders among football specific factors league position goals scored and promotion and relegation between the divisions are all important determinants of attendance patterns

forward contracts and futures contracts abstract this paper provides a detailed discussion of the similarities and differences between forward contracts and futures contracts under frictionless markets and continuous trading simple arbitrage arguments are invoked to value forward contracts to relate forward prices and spot prices and to relate forward prices and futures prices we also argue that forward prices need not equal futures prices unless default free interest rates are deterministic

multilateral trade negotiations bilateral opportunism and the rules of gatt wto abstract trade negotiations occur through time and between the governments of many countries an important issue is thus whether the value of concessions that a government wins in a current negotiation may be eroded in a future bilateral negotiation to which it is not party we identify rules of negotiation that serve to protect the welfare of governments that are not participating in the bilateral negotiation our main finding is that the two central principles of gatt wto nondiscrimination mfn and reciprocity preserve the welfare of nonparticipating governments and therefore offer a first line of defense against bilateral opportunism

trade negotiations domestic policies and the most favored nation clause this paper illustrates how restricting trade instruments to non discrimination links trade agreements to non trade agreements and under certain conditions helps governments further lower tariffs and or domestic standards policies these conditions are i governments objective functions are sufficiently concave with respect to domestic standards policies ii domestic standards are sufficiently valued and iii policies are strategic complements these can then be used as a rationale for restricting safeguard measures to non discrimination ce texte montre comment le fait de restreindre les instruments de politique commerciale a la seule poursuite de liens commerciaux libres de discrimination relie accords commerciaux et non commerciaux et a certaines conditions aide les gouvernements a reduire encore davantage les tarifs douaniers et ou les normes politiques nationales ces conditions sont que i les fonctions objectives soient suffisamment concaves par rapport aux normes politiques nationales ii les normes nationales soient suffisamment valorisees et iii les politiques soient des complements strategiques ces arguments fournissent le rationale pour limiter les mesures de protection a la seule non discrimination

on outcome uncertainty and scoring rates in sport the case of international rugby union in this paper we investigate the relationship between outcome uncertainty and scoring rates in the framework of a poisson match we argue that increasing scoring rates in the hope of increasing entertainment may have a detrimental impact on the popularity of sport the basis of our argument is that higher scoring rates decrease outcome uncertainty we use international rugby to demonstrate our findings and show that scoring rates have indeed increased significantly over the previous half century in this sport therefore administrators should recognise our general point and we suggest that rugby union administrators in particular ought to consider the introduction of new laws to reduce scoring rates scenarios in which the scoring rate is radically reduced are illustrated through a simulation of the rugby world cup tournament

dynamic tariffs with asymmetric information recent developments in dynamic game theory are applied to determine when two countries can sustain freer trade given that they determine trade policies non cooperatively countries know their own level of protection but not the other country s level of protection using import trigger strategies cooperation in the form of low tariffs can be supported although there are periodic reversionary high tariff episodes however if terms of trade trigger strategies are used cooperation does not occur

managed trade with imperfect information central to the general agreement on tariffs and trade gatt agreement signed in 1947 by 23 nations was the reduction of tariffs this had the direct result of bringing down the average ad valorem tariff on industrial goods from over 40 in 1947 to under 4 by the time of the uruguay round in 1995 furthermore following the kennedy round of 1969 the objectives of the gatt and of its successor the world trade organization wto were expanded so as to help bring down nontariff barriers as well remarkably these reductions were achieved in the absence of any external enforcement mechanism intended to punish gatt wto violators commitments were kept only as long as nations continued to view adherence to the agreements as being in their mutual interest 2 it is precisely because the contracting parties of the gatt wto have made it their top priority to reduce trade distortions that the subject of safeguards as an exception to the general rule of liberalizing trade comes into play when governments know they can increase tariffs temporarily in the event of a surge in import volume they agree to negotiate a more substantial tariff reduction during the negotiation stage 3 the move toward special protection is motivated in part by the fact that volatility in trade flows has become a more important source of domestic disruption these special protection policy tools are typically used to limit the rate of import or export expansion from that which would occur in the absence of intervention they are aimed at mitigating the underlining changes in trade flows where the basic insight developed in the literature is consistent with different government objectives to this end corden 1974 has argued that countries rarely initiate protection for the purpose of capturing the terms of trade gains presumably because of the fear of future retaliation by their trading partners countries

league level attendance and outcome uncertainty in u s pro sports leagues we extend the breakpoint literature regarding annual league level attendance and the impact of outcome uncertainty to the national basketball association national football league and national hockey league as our measures are different than past work on baseball we also apply our model to the american and national leagues attendance series for each league under consideration are not stationary overall but are stationary with break points no form of outcome uncertainty game play off or across seasons matters for attendance in hockey or baseball regardless of which game uncertainty variable is used under the measure of game uncertainty that recommends itself for football only play off uncertainty matters for attendance whether outcome uncertainty matters for basketball depends on the measure of game uncertainty situational similarities in the break points across leagues suggest general areas for future research jel l83 c22

sport event attendance as a function of education evidence from the uk abstractthis article studies the role of education in the decision to attend sporting events the overall objective is to verify whether more educated individuals are more likely to go to sports events than their less educated counterparts if education socializes persons to focus on sports it would then partially offset negative alternatives such as alcohol drug abuse and unlawful behaviours creating a positive externality sport events consumption is extensive highlighting the potential economic importance of the sports education externality to establish the role of education in sport attendance this article applies a probabilistic linear regression model to data from the uk the econometric formulation associates sport event attendance in the left hand side with education in the right hand side while controlling for the socioeconomic variables that are known to affect a consumer s decision to go to a sport event gender age income employment status children marital status and geographical

team roster turnover and attendance in major league baseball empirical support is shown for the propositionthat sports fans prefer the composition of their home team to remain the same from season to season controlling for price income population team quality league year the stadium effects the regression results indicate that for each percentage point increase in the turnover of the composition of the team attendance will fall by about 0 7 the implications of this heretofore ignored tendency are briefly discussed

impact of league restructuring on team sport attendances the case of rugby league an econometric analysis of attendances at rugby footbal league matches in england over the period 1966 1990 is presented the major finding is that the move from one to two leagues in 1973 had a substantial impact on attendances teams in the upper league experienced greater attendances ceteris paribuswhilst those in the lower league had reduced attendances

on the emergence of an mfn club equal treatment in an unequal world motivated by gatt we endogenize the formation of a club whose members have to abide by the mfn principle of non discrimination the underlying model is that of oligopolistic intraindustry trade while an mfn club does not alter average tariff levels across countries it increases aggregate world welfare makes non members worse off and can immiserize its high cost members these results imply that i core wto rules such as mfn are valuable even if multilateral negotiations deliver limited trade liberalization and ii the distributional effects of mfn maybe one reason why developing countries have been granted special and differential treatment at the wto jel classification f13 f10 f15

pre and within season attendance forecasting in major league baseball a random forest approach this study explores the forecasting of major league baseball game ticket sales and identifies important attendance predictors by means of random forests that are grown from classification and regre

multi lateral trade negotiations and the most favored nation clause abstract this paper considers the interaction between private information and the most favored nation clause in trade negotiations it demonstrates that by aggregating uncertainty over a number of trading partners the most favored nation clause may offer a welfare improvement over a set of bilateral trade negotiations this improvement is shown to be most pronounced when a large number of countries are involved in negotiations

social welfare in sports leagues with profit maximizing and or win maximizing clubs this article develops a contest model to compare social welfare in homogeneous leagues in which all clubs maximize identical objective functions with mixed leagues in which clubs maximize different objective functions we show that homogeneous leagues in which all clubs are profit maximizers dominate all other leagues mixed leagues in which small market clubs are profit maximizers and large market clubs are win maximizers type i mixed leagues are dominated by all other leagues from a welfare perspective large market clubs win too often in purely win maximizing and type i mixed leagues whereas small market clubs win too many games in purely profit maximizing leagues and in mixed leagues in which large market clubs are profit maximizers and small market clubs are win maximizers type ii mixed leagues these results have important policy implications social welfare will increase if clubs are reorganized from non profit member associations to profit maximizing corpora tions moreover we show that revenue sharing decreases increases social welfare in mixed homogeneous leagues

behaviour of non renewable natural resource firms under uncertainty optimizing or ad hoc abstract this paper tests the assumption of optimizing behaviour by natural resource firms in the framework of an intertemporal model of non renewable resource development and production using data from the petroleum industry it is argued that the presence of geological and price uncertainty presents a situation in which standard objections to non optimizing behaviour may not hold as an alternative it is proposed that firms use an ad hoc rule of thumb to update decisions as the values of variables change econometric results support ad hoc behaviour as opposed to intertemporal profit maximization

trends in natural resource commodity prices an analysis of the time domain abstract this paper attempts to reconcile the theoretical predictions of increasing real prices for nonrenewable natural resource commodities obtained from hotelling style models with the empirical findings of falling prices for these commodities a theoretical model for relative price movements is derived for the case of exogenous technical change and endogenous change in the grade of ores mined the model suggests a u shaped time path for relative prices the implied price movements are tested for all the major metals and fuels and the model parameters are found to be statistically significant for 11 out of the 12 commodities tested

unscripted drama soccer audience response to suspense surprise and shock by modeling minute by minute television audience figures from english premier league soccer matches with close to 50 000 minute observations we show that demand is partly driven by suspense and surprise we also identify an additional relevant factor of appeal to audiences namely shock which refers to the difference between pre match and current game outcome probabilities suspense surprise and shock remain significant in the presence of a traditional measure of outcome uncertainty jel c23 d12 l82 l83 z20

dyed in the wool an empirical note on fan loyalty this article attempts to investigate empirically the strength of intracity football club support and seeks to test the commonly held belief among the sports community that supporters will not switch allegiance between city rivals very readily to test this phenomenon data on the attendances of five english and two italian city rival clubs is used to conduct a cointegration analysis the results imply that a stable relationship does not exist between the attendance series which throws doubt on the proposition that supporters of a team are unlikely to switch their support to a rival club to test the possibility that this result could be due to fickle supporters ceasing to attend a sensitivity analysis is conducted between attendances and performance

location and survival in the national hockey league a model of professional sport franchises is introduced and used to explore the locational and other determi nants of profitability particular attention is paid to the effect of location on attendance market power and long run team quality whe n estimated using data for the national hockey league in 1977 78 the model indicates that location has an effect on each of these and tha t their combined effect on profitability is effective in explaining p rior and subsequent decisions concerning league expansion and franchi se relocation a number of other matters are also addressed includin g league arguments for antitrust exemption and league policies to res trict expansion copyright 1988 by blackwell publishing ltd

do countries free ride on mfn abstract the most favored nation mfn clause has long been suspected of creating a free rider problem in multilateral trade negotiations to address this issue we model multilateral negotiations as a mechanism design problem with voluntary participation we show that an optimal mechanism induces only the largest exporters to participate in negotiations over any product thus providing a rationalization for the principal supplier rule we also show that through this channel equilibrium tariffs vary according to the herfindahl hirschman index of export shares higher concentration in a sector reduces free riding and thus causes a lower tariff estimation of our model using sector level tariff data for the u s provides strong support for this relationship

the effect of futures markets and corners on storage and spot price variability when a futures market is introduced the volume of storage should become more sensitive to changes in the return to storage the increase in storage sensitivity means that storage will absorb a larger proportion of demand and supply shocks than it did previously reducing spot price volatility data from the chicago board of trade support the hypotheses of increased storage sensitivity and reduced spot price volatility the effect of futures on spot price volatility is sensitive to the competitive structure of the futures market futures market manipulation causes spot price variance to increase despite manipulation the development of the wheat futures market caused the coefficient of variation of spot price to decline significantly

financial fair play in european football in 2010 uefa the governing body of european football announced a set of financial restraints which clubs must observe when seeking to enter its competitions notably the uefa champions league we analyse the financial and sporting impact of these financial fair play ffp regulations in four major european football leagues we first discuss the details of ffp and frame these regulations in the institutional set up of the european football industry we then show how the break even constraint embedded in ffp could substantially reduce average payrolls and wage to turnover ratios while strengthening the position of the traditional top teams since the benefits of the break even rule to consumers remain unclear we argue that these rent shifting regulations might fall foul of european competition law thomas peeters and stefan szymanski