No two ways about it: the soccer World Cup competition in June 2006 in Germany was a great experience, not only for the soccer fans, and it still resonates far and wide. The various commentaries have all concluded that the economic effects were positive. Emphasis has often been placed on...

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...

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...

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...