Special issue: Papers from the Sixth European Sport Economics Association Conference.

Kesenne, Stefan ; Peeters, Thomas

GUEST EDITORS' INTRODUCTION

This special issue of the International Journal of Sports Finance (IJSF) presents a selection of papers presented at the 6th European Sport Economics Association (ESEA) Conference. The University of Antwerp hosted the ESEA annual conference September 3-5, 2014, at its historic city campus. Continuing the upward trajectory from previous meetings, the 2014 conference attracted 132 abstracts submitted for presentation at the event. The scientific committee accepted 93 of those for full conference presentations. Although most of the 150 participants came from European universities, we were happy to welcome colleagues from America, Asia, Australia, and Africa to the event. This again underlines the growing global appeal of ESEA and its annual conference.

This year ESEA further increased its commitments towards young researchers. First, several leading scholars in the field (Michael Lechner, Paul Downward, and Stefan Szymanski) taught in the second edition of the PhD course connected to the conference. Second, the Antwerp conference saw the first young researcher prize being awarded to Volker Robeck, whose paper is included in this special issue.

This is the fifth special issue of IJSF dedicated to publishing manuscripts from the annual conference, evidence of the collaboration between ESEA and its official journal. The papers brought together for this year's special issue were submitted to the IJSF following the call-for-papers sent to presenters after the conference. Due to space limitations not all submitted papers could be published here. All papers went through the journal's normal double-blind review process to ensure that their academic merit matches the high standards set by the journal. The three papers that came out of the selection cover very distinct topics, and as such showcase the variety of research within the field of sport economics.

Robeck's award-winning paper presents a theoretical model to understand the doping behavior of athletes and their teams. Dennis Coates and Pamela Wicker investigate an interesting voting dataset from the referendum on Munich's bid to organize the 2022 Winter Olympics. This allows them to shed light on some of the issues surrounding the hosting of mega-events from a political economy point-of-view. Finally, Rodney Paul and Andrew Weinbach look at the link between consumer demand for sports betting and TV broadcasts.

It is fair to say that the anonymous reviewers played a crucial role in the selection process that these papers went through. We would therefore like to thank them for their assistance. A further word of gratitude goes towards the new editorial team at FiT Publishing, which publishes the IJSF, who assisted us with all types of practical and scientific advice. In relation to this entire process we would further like to thank Jan Bouckaert, Sophie Nys, and all assisting staff at the University of Antwerp, without whose help the successful organization of the conference would not have been possible.

Stefan Kesenne [1] and Thomas Peeters [2]

[1] University of Antwerp and University of Leuven

[2] Erasmus School of Economics, Tinbergen Institute and ERIM

Stefan Kesenne is emeritus professor at the Universities of Antwerp and Leuven. Throughout his career he has taught and researched a wide variety of topics within economics. Today his primary research interest is sports economics.

Thomas Peeters is an assistant professor in the Erasmus School of Economics at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. His teaching and research are in applied industrial organization, managerial economics and sports economics.