What athletes have taught economists

Economists use more and more sports data to test their theories, Sports offer a very fruitful "laboratory" where highly experienced and motivated individuals make permanently strategic decisions in a controlled and invariant framework. It is therefore not surprising to observe the rise in empirical studies based on sports data. These studies rely on four main categories of dataset: salaries of professional athletes, results from tournaments, records (especially from track and field) and athletes' strategies observed during the games. In this paper, we review the main results from these four types of studies.