Online sports marketing has become the best foundation for building fan communities for professional sports league and teams. With the development of more powerful technologies, access to the internet has increased. Websites are now including media such as audio and video files, podcasts and live broadcasts of league games. More powerful media has also enabled more user interaction and user empowerment. Two key elements in the increasing use of online services to increase the effectiveness of online sports marketing are multimedia and user interaction. Together, they provide an increasingly sophisticated, powerful and user-based medium that offers marketing challenges and opportunities to business organisations including professional sport organisations.Related to improved user engagement is the increasing sophistication of sports websites. Creating value for fans has become more difficult because they want more benefits from online experiences, including the development of social connections.Teams could take advantage of fans' attachment by creating interactive web spaces, extending team experiences and building fan loyalty.

This paper examines the gender wage gap as well as male and female earnings as a function of within-firm tenure in the Czech Republic during 2004-2008. Using segmented regression, the wage gap and tenure were found positively correlated for approximately the first five years of within-firm employment, after which the correlation was near zero. Returns on tenure were greater for men than women, with a statistically significant breakpoint at the seven-year mark for men. These findings confirmed the outcome of other researchers who attributes the gender wage gap to the life and work cycles of women. The model of deferred compensation, in which women are more likely to select out of companies that defer compensation, may help explain the results.

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Theoretical notions in the literature suggest the existence of a negative relationship between earnings inequality and social capital as measured by interpersonal trust. In a number of crosscountry studies this negative relationship has been confirmed. However, in later cross country-studies that control for per capita wealth and several characteristics of the population and analyse one year or shifts over longer periods find no relationship between inequality and trust. In our study we take into account that socio-cultural factors may obscure this relationship. Our main focus is on the role of a country’s welfare regime. Four regimes are distinguished: social democratic regime, conservative regime, liberal regime and transition country. We further examine the impact on interpersonal trust of per capita GDP and the societal indicators percent of residents with tertiary education, percent urbanization, government spending as a percent of GDP. We use data over four points of time from 17 European countries. Besides cross-section OLS regression models using averaged data, fixed-effects models are estimated to control for unobserved time-invariant factors. We find the hypothesised negative relationship between earnings inequality and interpersonal trust not confirmed by our data. Our findings do suggest associations between interpersonal trust and welfare regime. With regard to the welfare regime, we found in particular that a conservative regime, a liberal regime and a transition regime are all associated with a much lower level of interpersonal trust than a social democratic regime. The difference in the level of interpersonal trust from countries with a social democratic regime is largest in countries in transition and smallest in countries with a liberal regime. For the development of institutions that can raise the transition countries to higher levels of social capital and economic development, those from the social democratic welfare regime appear to offer the best perspective. The social democratic welfare regime not only pays more attention to the socially vulnerable in society by paying their benefits, but – in addition to that – by investing in strengthening their productive capabilities to improve their chances on the labour market.

This article examines the impact of commodity price uncertainty on the U.S. economic activity. Our analysis indicates that uncertainty in agricultural, energy and metals markets depresses economic activity in the United States. Uncertainty shocks in agricultural and metals markets have a more longlasting dampening effect on economic activity and its components, when compared to the effect of oil uncertainty shocks. Finally, we show that when accounting for the effects of macroeconomic and monetary factors, the negative dynamic response of economic activity to agricultural and metals uncertainty shocks remains unaltered, while the respective macroeconomic response to energy uncertainty shocks is significantly reduced.