Visiting Researchers / Guests

Dr. Ruseski is an applied microeconomist with interests in health economics, health financing and policy, sports economics, and industrial organization. Much of her current research studies the socioeconomic determinants of health and (un)healthy behaviors; the effect of health behaviors on outcomes, including chronic health conditions, obesity, and health disparities; the mechanisms underlying health behaviors; and the effect of public policy on health. The overarching goal of this research is to inform the policy environment in an effort to implement policies and interventions that will promote health behaviors and reduce the burden of disease. Dr. Ruseski has published in academic journals including Contemporary Economic Policy, Health Economics, Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, Southern Economic Journal, BE Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, and Journal of Sports Economics. She is a co-editor of Contemporary Economic Policy and an associate editor of the International Journal of Sport Finance.

Pamela Wicker studied Sport Sciences with a Major in Economics and Management at the German Sport University Cologne where she was awarded a PhD in 2009. From 2011 to 2012 she was employed as a Senior Lecturer at Griffith University, Australia. On her return to the German Sport University Cologne, she earned her Habilitation in October 2013 and the associated title of ‘Private Lecturer’ (PD) in January 2014. Pamela’s research interests are in the areas of sport economics, sport finance, and sport management. Specifically, she looks at resources of sport clubs, participation in sport and physical activity, labor markets in sport, sport consumer behavior, and monetary valuation of intangibles. Pamela is Associate Editor (Economics) and Social Media Editor of Sport Management Review, serves on the Editorial Board of another four journals (Journal of Sport Management, International Journal of Sport Finance, Managing Sport and Leisure, Journal of Sport & Tourism), and referees articles and research proposals for a wide range of international journals and organizations. Currently, Pamela is the Youth Development Officer of the European Sport Economics Association (ESEA).

Guojun Zhao is a director of postal development and research center of BUPT. She received her PhD from BUPT. Her main research domains are postal strategy and management. During decades of research, she has completed numbers of projects as a project leader. Currently, she is also on the job of Expert of informatization Committee of Ministry of communications; director of China Express Association; Member of the steering committee of the national postal Vocational Education; Special expert of China Postal Newspaper; Special expert of think-tank of State Post Bureau of The People’s republic of China; Secretary-general of Beijing Opera Chengpai National Academy of Art. Many major Chinese media, such as news broadcast, people's network, etc. had reported her work. Guojun Zhao is also a passionate Beijing opera lover and researcher.

Chris Anderson is Professor in European Politics and Policy.
A student of political behaviour, Anderson’s research has centred on the micro-foundations of markets and democracy. Past research projects have investigated the popularity of governments, the dynamics of public opinion about European integration, and people’s satisfaction with democracy. In other streams of research, he has investigated the connection between welfare states and citizen behaviour and the political attitudes and behaviours of immigrants in Europe.
Anderson is the recipient of several scientific prizes, including the American Political Science Association’s Heinz Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review and the Best Article Award from the Journal of Politics. He also has served as President of the American Political Science Association’s Sections on European Politics & Society and Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior, and on the editorial boards of a number of leading academic journals.
Anderson also has an interest in the political economy of sports. His book on football analytics, co-authored with David Sally, is titled The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Football Is Wrong (Penguin) and combines social scientific insights with football data to understand player and team performance. He has extensive experience in the football industry and is a regular speaker at analytics and sports industry events, including the prestigious Sports Analytics Conference held annually in Boston by MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
Previously, Anderson held permanent or visiting appointments at Rice University, Northwestern University, the State University of New York, Syracuse University, the University of Oxford, Cornell University, and the University of Warwick. A native of Germany, he was educated at the University of Cologne, Virginia Tech, and Washington University in St. Louis, where he received his PhD.
He serves on the Board of Trustees for the American School in London.

Dr Babatunde Buraimo is a Senior Lecturer in Sports Management. He was educated at the University of Sheffield and Lancaster University, where he holds a doctoral degree in economics. Dr Buraimo specialises in sports management and economics and has published extensively on the economics of sports broadcasting, demand for sports, and economics of sports participation. In addition, Dr Buraimo takes a keen research interest in the economics of football. On matters specific to football, his publications include research on the economics of corruption, competitive balance in professional team sports, television audience and stadium demand, and football statistics. Currently, Dr Buraimo is conducting research in the areas of sports migration, the financial history of English football, uncertainty of outcome in sports, and sports betting.

Dennis Coates is Professor of Economics at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is the Book Review Editor for the Journal of Sports Economics and on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Sport Finance and the Journal of Sport Management. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Maryland, College Park and was on the faculty of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill before moving to UMBC in 1995. His work focuses on political economy and public policy issues with emphasis on sport and sports economics topics.

Gokhan Ertug is an associate professor of strategic management at the Lee Kong Chian School of Business, Singapore Management University. He is currently an Associate Editor of the Academy of Management Journal. He received his PhD from INSEAD. He studies status, reputation, trust, networks, inequality, discrimination, knowledge management, innovation, and entrepreneurship. His research has appeared in journals such as the Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of International Business Studies, Organization Science, and Strategic Management Journal.

Bernd Frick is Professor of Organizational, Media, and Sports Economics in the Management Department at Paderborn University, Paderborn, Germany. Before taking his current position, he was Professor of Organizational and Personnel Economics at Ernst-Moritz-Arndt University Greifswald and Reinhard Mohn-Chair in Organizational Economics and Business Ethics at Wit-ten/Herdecke University. He studied sociology, economics and political science at the Universi-ty of Trier and at Clark University, Worcester, MA and received both, his Ph.D. and his “Habili-tation” in Business Economics at the University of Trier (the former with a dissertation in la-bour economics and the latter with a comparative study in industrial relations). In the last 25 years, he refused offers from Max Planck Institute for Human Development Berlin, London School of Economics and Political Science, University of Vienna, Zeppelin University Friedrichs-hafen, and Turkish German University Istanbul. In the meantime, he has published nearly 90 papers in refereed journals and is currently working on a book with the tentative title “Con-quering the Pitch: Money, Management and Crowd Wisdom in Football”. When younger, he was a mediocre football player and a competitive marathon runner (although somewhat slow-er today, he continues to be a dedicated athlete).

Jaume Garcia-Villar is professor at UPF, researcher at the Center for Research in Health and Economics (CRES), and Barcelona GSE Affiliated Professor. His experience in the world of research focuses on applied microeconometrics, labour, sport and health economics, and the real estate market. In these areas, he has published over 100 articles and book chapters. These include studies for the Government of Catalonia on the Catalan and the Spanish economies. He was director of the School of International Trade between 1995 and 2005 and president of the National Statistics Institute between 2008 and 2011. Currently, he sits on the editorial board of the journal Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy. Professor Garcia-Villar has been appointed a member of the European Statistical Governance Advisory Board (ESGAB) for 2018-2021. The European Statistical Governance Advisory Board is one of the governing bodies of the European Statistical System (ESS). Its purpose is to improve its independence, integrity and responsibility, key provisions of the body’s Code of Practice. It also aims to improve the quality of European statistics. Among others, each year it draws up a report for the European Parliament and Council on the implementation of the Code of Practice for Eurostat. It is composed of seven members who are chosen from among professionals with exceptional skills in the field of statistics.

Thomas Grund is Associate Professor in Sociology at University College Dublin. He is currently Head of Teaching and Learning at the School of Sociology at University College Dublin and was Visiting Professor at the Institute of Sociology at University of Zurich and Simon Visiting Professor at the University of Manchester. Before coming to Ireland, he was Assistant Professor and Deputy Director at the Institute for Analytical Sociology at Linköping University, Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute for Futures Studies and Stockholm University and post-doctoral fellow at ETH Zurich and Université de Montréal. Dr Grund studied Computer Science and Sociology at the University of Trier and University of Cambridge and obtained a PhD in Sociology from Nuffield College, University of Oxford.
His main research interests are social networks and analytical sociology. He has published in journals such as Social Networks, Network Science, European Sociological Review, Social Science Research and Scientific Reports. His research on discrimination in the English Premier League, passing networks and team performance in sports, and niceness and nastiness has been reported on in the Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, BBC Radio and other media outlets. Currently, Dr. Grund is also co-editor of the Irish Journal of Sociology. Outside of work, Thomas is a passionate long-distance hiker.

Dr Li Hao is a PhD student in Management Science and Engineering at Beijing Institute of Technology. He received his master degree at Shanghai University in 2017. Dr Li specializes in resource allocation, mechanism analytics and policy evaluation in primary healthcare. In addition, Dr Li takes a keen research interest in studying healthcare operation by using the method of big data, game theory and non-linear programming. In recent five years, he has published seven papers in Chinese and two papers in English. His publications include research on system evaluation, compensation mechanism, risk allocation, salary incentive mechanism for doctors and intervention mechanism of healthcare service goods. Currently, he is working on two Key Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China related to healthcare management a key participant.

Brad R. Humphreys is a native West Virginian and WVU alumni. He holds a BS in Business Administration and a BS in Economics from the WVU College of Business and Economics and an MA and PhD in economics from the Johns Hopkins University. He is a professor of economics in the College of Business and Economics. He previously held positions on the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Alberta, and the University of Maryland-Baltimore County. He is the 2016-17 Benedum Distinguished Scholar in Social and Behavioral Sciences at WVU. His research on the economics and financing of professional sports and the economics of gambling has been published in academic journals in economics and policy analysis, including the Journal of Urban Economics, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, the Journal of Regional Science, the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Empirical Economics, Public Finance Review, and Regional Science and Urban Economics. He has published more than 100 papers in peer-reviewed journals in economics and public policy. He is the co-editor of the three volume The Business of Sport, a comprehensive examination of sports business, economics, and finance which was named an Outstanding Business Reference Source by the Business Reference Sources Committee of the American Library Association. He is Editor-in-Chief of Contemporary Economic Policy, a general interest economics journal and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Sports Economics, the International Journal of Sport Finance, the International Journal of Sport Management and Marketing, and International Gambling Studies. He twice testified before the United States Congress on the economic impact of professional sports teams and facilities. He has also testified before the Massachusetts legislature and Washington DC City Council on the financing of sports facilities. In 2014 he co-authored a report with economists from the Brattle Group for the Governor’s Office of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts evaluating taxpayer liabilities associated with hosting the 2024 Olympic Games; the Boston 2024 Olympic Bid was terminated shortly after the report was issued.

Michael Lechner works as professor of Econometrics at the University of St. Gallen since 1998. In 1994, he received his PhD in Economics and Econometrics at the University of Mannheim. He co-heads the Swiss Institute for Empirical Economic Research (SEW). He is interested in the evaluation of labor market programmes, sports economics, and the development of microeconometric methods for causal inference and their link to machine learning. He has published in the Journal of Econometrics, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Journal of the European Economic Association, the European Economic Review, and the Journals of Labor Economics, of Health Economics and of Human Resources among many others. He is a Fellow of the German Academy of Science Leopoldina (Halle), and the Center for Economic Policy Reseach (CEPR, London).

Ignacio Palacios-Huerta is Professor of Managerial Economics and Strategy at the London School of Economics since 2007, Senior Fellow of the Ikerbasque Foundation (UPV / EHU) since 2011, and member of the Scientific Programme Committee at the European Club Association (ECA) since 2015. He previously held the post of Professor of Economics at Brown University, and has worked as assistant, associate or visiting professor at Brown University, the University of Chicago, and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He also was National Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He has been a consultant for the IMF and the World Bank, Head of Talent ID (2011-14) and member of the Board of Directors (2015-18) at Athletic Club de Bilbao, a professional football club in Spain's La Liga. Professor Palacios-Huerta has a BSc. in Mathematical Economics from the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU (1989), and an M.A. in Economics (1991) and a PhD. in Economics from the University of Chicago (1995). His doctoral thesis “Risk and Return in Human and Financial Investments” was directed by Gary Becker (Nobel Prize in Economics 1991) and Kevin Murphy. He has published in world leading journals in Economics such as the American Economic Review, Econometrica, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Public Economics, Review of Economics and Statistics, and others. His two most recents books are: Beautiful Game Theory, published in 2014 by Princeton University Press (translated into French and Chinese), and In 100 Years: Leading Economists Predict the Future, published by MIT Press in 2013 and translated into French, Korean, Japanese, Chinese and Polish. Professor Palacios-Huerta's research mainly focuses on identifying and studying novel questions concerning individual and aggregate human behavior, including strategic behaviour in competitive settings, human preferences, incentives and human capital, often taking advantage of the unique opportunities that sports data provide.

Dr Giambattista Rossi joined the Department of Management, Birkbeck College, as a Lecturer in Management in September 2014, where he is responsible for a course module on sport labour markets. Previously, he studies for his undergraduate degree in economics at the Universita’ Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan before completing an MSc in Sport Studies at the University of Stirling, Scotland. He was awarded his PhD in Management at Birkbeck College, University of London, where his research focused on the economic value of professional football players. From 2012 to 2014 he held the position of Senior Lecturer in Sport Management at the University of East London (UEL) where he was also director of the postgraduate programme in sport management. Giambattista’s main research interest is in the area of labour markets in professional sport. In particular, he investigates the role of sport agents, third party ownership in football, athletes’ remuneration and their economic value, team performance and individual athletes’ contract duration. He has been involved in a number of research projects looking at football players’ transfer market and third party ownership in football.

Rob Simmons is a Lecturer in Economics. He was educated at University of Warwick and University of Manchester and holds a doctorate from University of Leeds. Dr Simmons specialises in labour economics and sports economics. He has published on theoretical and empirical aspects of labour economics, covering areas such as union bargaining over working time, demand-side analysis of working time and efficiency wage models including adverse selection and shirking behaviour. He has been engaged as a consultant to the International Labour Organisation. Dr Simmons is a member of the European Association of Labour Economists and he has presented several papers at their annual conference. Currently, Dr Simmons is pursuing interests in personnel economics, including the impact of changing human resource management practices on the labour market. Dr Simmons also has an international reputation as a sports economist. He has researched into several topics in sports economics, many of which have a labour market focus. He has published pioneering papers on attendance demand in football using a travel cost methodology, on football transfer markets using a sample selection model and on salary determination in Italian football using a rarely published data set.
He is currently working on several topics in sports economics, including a new theoretical model of sports league behaviour, economic analysis of sports broadcasting, the labour market for players in the US National Football League and further analysis of earnings in Italian football. Dr Simmons is a member of the editorial board of Journal of Sports Economics. He was also recently a co-convenor of the ESRC financed Sports, Arts and Leisure Economics Study Group. Outside work, Rob is married with two children and his leisure interests include cinema, travel, keeping fit and football refereeing.

Dr. Stefan Szymanski came to the University of Michigan School of Kinesiology as the Stephen J. Galetti Professor of Sport Management in 2011. Before that he had appointments at London Business School, Imperial College Business School, and Cass Business School, all in London. Dr. Szymanski completed an undergraduate degree at the University of Oxford, and received his PhD in Economics at Birkbeck College, University of London. As a leading expert in the economics of sports in general and soccer in particular, he is widely quoted in the media and has written op-eds for the New York Times, Washington Post, and Financial Times. You can follow him on Twitter (@sszy) and on his blog (soccernomics-agency.com).
Dr. Szymanski has authored more than one hundred academic papers published in reviewed journals, mostly on the economics and history of sport. He is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestseller Soccernomics (with Simon Kuper), the fourth edition of which appeared in 2018. The book has been translated into fifteen languages. A history of sports in Detroit (co-authored with Silke Weineck) will be published in 2020.
Dr. Szymanski has appeared as an expert witness on the economics of sport in numerous court cases on issues such as the collective sale of broadcast rights, the valuation of soccer clubs, and recently for the US Department of Justice on the economics of corruption in relation to the trial of former FIFA executives.

Thijs Velema is assistant professor at the Department of Business Management at National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan. His research focuses on the transfer market in European professional football analyzing the relations between social structures in the market, the careers of individual players, and the performance of professional football organizations. His most recent publications seek to understand how players move through the market and how professional football teams act and learn on the market. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from National Taiwan University.