We analyze attendance of professional football matches in England finding that it is related to unemployment over a very long period of time. More unemployment leads to lower attendances. Distinguishing between leagues, we find that the relationship is larger for lower leagues, i.e. attendance...

The economics of sport and how sport provides insights into economics have experienced exogenous shocks from COVID-19, facilitating many natural experiments. These have provided partial answers to questions of: how airborne viruses may spread in crowds; how crowds respond to the risk and...

In this paper, the monetary policy independence of European nations in the years before European Monetary Union (EMU) is investigated using cointegration techniques. Daily data is used to assess pairwise relationships between individual EMU nations and ‘lead' nation Germany, to assess the...

This article uses automatic model selection procedures, based on the general-to-speci fic approach, to investigate inflation in China. A novelty of this article is the use of a technique called impulse indicator saturation which allows us to uncover instabilities and to specify a very general...

It has been established in the economics literature that competitive outcomes can be well predicted by the aggregate salaries of the contesting participants. In this paper we use this idea to construct a forecast test to evaluate a novel, and hitherto unevaluated source of wage data. If the...

The number of people consuming sporting events has long interested economists. Although imperfect, it is a measure of the demand for a ‘peculiar’ type of good or service — the sporting event. It also provides some measure of the social pressure on individuals performing. That pressure can...

We use a series of historical natural experiments in association football to test whether social pressure from a home stadium crowd affected behaviour and outcomes. The standout effect of an empty stadium was that referees cautioned visiting players less often, by over a third of a yellow card...

We revisit the magnitude of home advantage at the Summer and Winter Olympic Games, looking back all the way to Athens in 1896. By comparing a host country’s success with their performances in previous and subsequent games, we find that home advantage has declined over time as participation and...