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...

In this paper we analyze the total line betting market for National Basketball Association (NBA) regular season games for the 2009-2012 seasons. Specifically, we divide seasons by week and analyze points scored, total lines and game statistics such as field goal percentage and turnovers. We find...

Daily trading in INTRADE’s 2008 U.S. Presidential electoral markets is analyzed in this paper. INTRADE provides a unique bridge connecting the political voting literature and the price probabilities in the growing prediction market research. Since these markets involve only fixed return...

We study the perceived discrepancy between power conference and mid-major college football teams by examining outcomes of games when these teams face one another. We find that point spreads are set statistically irrationally in games where power conference teams play mid-major teams. We examine...

Prediction markets have emerged fairly recently as a promising forecasting mechanism to handle efficiently the dynamic aggregation of dispersed information among various agents. The interest that this mechanism attracts seems to be increasing at a steady rate, in terms of both business interest...

Traditionally, the main function of prediction markets (PMs) has been to provide information about probabilities for various events. Good information requires a well-functioning market, which in turn depends on sufficient liquidity and a sufficient number of market participants. While many of...

Case studies examine the extent to which insider trades in financial markets are a reflection of publicly-based forecasts based on (1) candlestick charts and (2) adaptive drift modeling (ADM) of cointegrated time processes depicted in such charts. ADM accommodates both gradual Darwinian-type...

The objective of this paper is to determine which point of the business cycle offers investors the best reward to risk ratio in the stock market. Expected reward is defined as expected return in excess of the risk free rate, whereas risk is defined as the standard deviation of return. Thus, the...