The contingent valuation method (CVM) is used to estimate the willingness to pay (WTP) to keep a football club in a city in Spain (R. C. Deportivo de A Coruña). The authors pay attention to the distinction between genuine and protest zeros in the answer to an open-ended question. The authors propose the use of a Double Hurdle model where the information in the questionnaire for identifying the zeros is not used. The estimated nonuse value represents more than 81% of the total value. Nevertheless, when aggregating the sample estimates to population figures, the WTP is far below the amount of money of some potential decisions of the public authorities.

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This article tries to assess empirically the relative importance of the key factors determining a basketball team performance. For this, and considering performance to be the result of an underlying production process, we estimate a logit model where the output produced by a team is the game outcome and the inputs are those play characteristics that impact on that outcome. From the results obtained it seems that, on average, there is a substantial difference between the impact of each play characteristic on a team's winning probability and that probability varies as the quality/ quantity of the inputs changes, albeit not proportionally.

This paper tries to analyse to what extent the public debt yield spread of German and Spanish sovereign bonds is related with the Spanish economic fundamentals. An analysis of different Spanish economic variables (public debt/GDP, private debt/GDP, inflation rate, unemployment rate and borrowing capacity) from 1990 to 2012 is done previous to a cointegration analysis. Results do not allow us to confirm strongly the long term relationship between public debt yield spread and the referred economic variables as a whole null hypothesis. In this sense, there is not enough evidence to show that premium risk evolution is determined by Spanish economic fundamentals progression in the long term, and thus a speculative component might be considered as a determinant. Therefore, the referred spread role as an economic policy objective should be relativized since it cannot be proved that tackling the analysed economic variables could reduce the spread significantly.

This article investigates the influence of local market size on playing success in professional Spanish football. In order to examine this relationship, several regressions were run for linear, beta and fractional logit models, using various proxies of local market size as explanatory variables. The evidence emerging from our analysis suggests that the advantage of big-market teams results in substantial dominance by a very small group of clubs. Nevertheless, this advantage does not actually prevent teams that are located in areas with a small market size from having at least regular opportunities for success. Furthermore, the econometric modelling and the evidence obtained provide a rational basis for supporting the idea of promoting the creation of a cross-national league in Europe (the European Superleague).