Labour economics:  economics of working time; employment effects of working time reductions in Germany; union bargaining over working time; efficiency wage models; adverse selection models; personnel economics.

Sports economics:   earnings of sports stars; pay and performance of players and teams in US and European sports; spatial and match-by-match models of attendance demand in sports;  economics of sports broadcasting;
models of outcome uncertainty and competitive balance in sports leagues; betting markets in sports.

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.

Undergraduate: Econ 211 Introduction to Mathematical Economics