Editorial: Sports, economics, and natural experiments: advances and retrospection

Abstract

Sports provide a unique field laboratory for advancing behavioral microeconomics, offering precise and objective measurements of behavior due to standardized rules, clear observability, and highly motivated expert participants. Extensive data on sports are readily available, continuously refined and expanded, and cover the same or similar contestants over long periods. Additionally, sports offer numerous natural experiments where exogenous factors plausibly divide individuals, teams, or organizations into treatment and control groups, allowing for causal analysis. Despite these advantages, economic studies using sports often face challenges regarding external validity. Such studies can appear niche and may be difficult to understand for those unfamiliar with sports, potentially limiting the broader applicability of their findings and hindering the full use of sports as a platform for testing economic theories. The aim of this Research Topic was to showcase examples of research that harness sports as a field laboratory, leverage natural experiments, and replicate or validate existing findings. This collection features two studies exploiting natural experiments, three capitalizing on the advantages of sports data for measuring productivity, and one replication study. Below is a brief overview of these studies.