In any dataset with individual forecasts of economic variables, some forecasters will perform better than others. However, it is possible that these ex post differences reflect sampling variation and thus overstate the ex ante differences between forecasters. In this paper, we present a simple...

Even before the financial crisis of 2007/08, there were significant questions about Europe's long-term growth prospects. After a long period of catching up with US levels of labour productivity, euro area productivity growth had, from the mid-1990s onwards, fallen significantly behind. Using...

Following the work of Shin (1993) and Cain, Law and Peel (1997, 2001), several researchers have reported estimates of the fraction of money placed on sports betting by "insiders" with superior information to bookmakers. We show the method for estimating the fraction of insiders used in this...

The support of home spectators is one of the contributing factors to the home advantage effect in sports matches. The Covid-19 pandemic led to European soccer matches being played without spectators. We show that betting markets adjusted swiftly to account for a reduced home advantage in both...

It is ten years since Mario Draghi's "whatever it takes" speech and the announcement of the OMT programme designed to address financial fragmentation. This paper reviews the sources of financial fragmentation including and discusses whether monetary tightening over the next few years will...

Sports betting is growing rapidly in the US after its legalization by the Supreme Court in 2018. This paper describes the treatment of gambling winnings and losses in the federal tax code and shows how the system may incentivize some gamblers to substantially increase the scale of their betting...

If betting markets are efficient, then the expected loss rate on all bets on a game can be calculated from the quoted odds. Guides to sports betting tell bettors how to do this calculation of the predicted average loss rate. We show that if bookmakers set higher profit margins for bets with...

Online sports betting is growing rapidly around the world. We describe how the competitive structure of the bookmaking market affects odds when bettors disagree about the probabilities of the outcomes of sporting events but are on average correct. We show that the demand for bets on longshots is...

We describe how the presence of insiders with superior information about potential outcomes of sporting events affects odds set by bookmakers, using a generalized version of the model in Shin (1991). The model has been widely cited as an explanation for the pattern of favorite-longshot bias...

We examine how people's forecasts for oil or gasoline prices influence their forecasts for broader inflation. We find little evidence from two US household surveys that people over-react to their beliefs about gasoline prices when formulating their forecasts about inflation, with much of the...