We investigate to what extent crowd support contributes to the home advantage in soccer, disentangling this effect from other mechanisms such as players' familiarity with the stadium and travel fatigue. To evaluate the relevance of crowd support in determining home advantage we analyze...

While existing research supports that participation in high-school athletics is associated with better education and labour-market outcomes, the mechanisms through which these benefits accrue are not well established. We use data from a large public-school district to retrieve an estimate of the...

The Covid-19 pandemic has induced worldwide natural experiments on the effects of crowds. We exploit one of these experiments currently taking place over several countries in almost identical settings: professional football matches played behind closed doors. We find large and statistically...

International sports will have to strengthen their efforts to exclude persons with morals in conflict with their sports. IOC and FIFA should mirror their top ambitions in athletic and financial areas by similarly leading ambitions to serve human mankind more generally. To encounter critiques...

We project the medal number and medal ranking for the Olympic Games in London in 2012. The largest relative increase is predicted for Brazil (80% more medals) and the UK (+28%). UK will continue to rank 4th. The largest decreases in medal numbers are predicted for Australia (-13%, but remains in...

Rose & Spiegel (2011) find that Olympic Games host countries experience significant positive and lasting effects on exports. They interpret their results as an indication that countries use the hosting of such an event as a signal of their (new) openness and competitiveness. We challenge these...

Rose & Spiegel (2011) find that Olympic Games host countries experience significant positive, lasting effects on exports. They interpret their results as an indication that countries use the hosting of such events to signal openness and competitiveness. We challenge these empirical findings on...

Recent analyses relate increases in the growth rate of countries to anticipation effects caused by bidding for the Olympic Games, so called news shocks. We argue that these findings should be interpreted cautiously. First, these analyses may suffer from an omitted variable bias because they...

To assess the likely effects of population ageing on the outcomes of direct democracy, we analyze the effect of age on voting decisions in public referenda. To this end, we provide the first quantitative review of the literature and a case study of the Stuttgart 21 referendum on one of the...

This contribution analyzes 132 factors on their potential to discriminate countries bidding for hosting the Olympic Games from non-bidding countries. Our binary, clustered model using generalized estimating equations (GEE) shows that countries recording long-term economic growth and pursuing a...