When skilled labour is imported, skill levels of local workers may be raised by contact with new techniques and practices. European basketball offers an opportunity to test this general claim. For a panel of 47 countries observed over more than twenty years, we model probability of qualification...

From the Olympics to the World Cup, mega sporting events are a source of enjoyment for tens of thousands of people, but can also be a source of intense debate and controversy. This insightful Handbook addresses a number of central questions, including: How are host cities selected and under what...

The paper focuses on dismissals of football managers and whether such decisions appear to contribute to organisational goals or else to be fruitless exercises in scapegoating. Its empirical setting is Argentina where incidence of sackings is more than one per season per club. It models 20years...

In this paper we attempt to establish a nexus between migration decisions and self-assessed happiness, where migration is taken as a mechanism for revealing preferences. The happiness literature has proposed both economic and non-economic determinants of happiness which are very similar to the...

The paper reports the results of an exercise to forecast national team medal totals at the Beijing Olympic Games, 2008. Forecasts were released to the media before the competitions commenced. The starting point was an established statistical model based on a regression analysis of medal totals...

This paper provides empirical evidence of the role of spatial factors on the determination of inflation dynamics for a representative set of tradable commodities in Chile. We present a simple model that explains inflation divergence across regions in a monetary union with similar preferences as...

Analysis of managerial efficiency in sport economics typically focuses on evaluating coach decisions instead of assessing the organization as a whole. This paper studies the relative importance of variables related to power and managerial decisions by estimating stochastic production frontiers...

This work studies long-term autocorrelation asymmetries in the dynamics of crude oil markets for prices in the period from 1986 to 2014. Autocorrelations in crude oil price returns are quantified in terms of the Hurst exponent estimated with the rescaled range (R/S) method. The results obtained...

Meeting the goals of sustainable growth of food production and reducing rural poverty requires assisting family farmers to develop more productive, profitable, resource efficient and environmentally friendly farms. Faced with decreasing product prices and increasing production costs during the...