Incentives and Strategic Behavior of Professional Boxers

This paper studies the strategic behaviour of professional boxers in choosing the opponent and sharing the revenues generated by the fight. In professional boxing, a higher-ranked boxer has an upper hand in choosing his opponent among many challengers varying in popularity and strength. We build a three-stage model of a professional boxing fight/bout between the chooser and the one of his challengers to examine the strategic incentives of a chooser in sharing the purse in Nash Bargaining framework and exerting proper level of effort within a contest theory model. More importantly, we endogenize the choice of the opponent and thus the purse to be generated by the bout. We characterize the factors affecting the choice of an “optimal” opponent and the effort level exerted by the chooser and the opponent. One interesting result of the paper is that an older chooser who is ready to cash in his reputation tends to choose a stronger opponent, but puts little effort into the fight. On the other hand, a young rising “star” in the boxing market prefers a match against weaker opponents in order to minimize his risk of losing and to maximize his record of the “winning” outcomes along with market values

Remittances, institutions and financial inclusion: new evidence of non-linearity

This paper investigates the effect of remittance inflows on financial inclusion. Using data from high remittance-receiving developing countries and applying dynamic panel data methods, we find that remittance inflow has a negative impact on financial inclusion for countries with low level of remittances. However, this relationship is positive for countries with high level of remittances. Our study found that there exists a nonlinear relationship between remittances and financial inclusion. We also show that the effect of remittances on the financial inclusion is conditional upon people’s perception about institutions