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 note, we consider early evidence regarding behavioural responses to an emerging public health emergency. We explore patterns in stadium attendance demand by exploiting match-level data from the Belarusian Premier League (BPL), a football competition that kept playing unrestricted in...

We use representative payroll data from Great Britain to document novel facts about nominal wage adjustments, focusing on workers who stayed in the same firm and job from one year to the next. The richness of these data allows us to analyse basic pay and the other components of earnings, such as...

Intuition and sports knowledge suggest the most talented professional footballers play for the best teams, i.e. positive assortative matching based on productivity. We consider Major League Soccer between 2007 and 2017. We estimate a wage equation, finding that player and team fixed wage...

Using UK employer-employee panel data, we present novel facts on how wages and working hours respond to the business cycle within jobs. Firms reacted to the Great Recession with substantial real wage cuts and by recruiting more part-time workers. A one percentage point increase in the...

If fiscal policy exerts pressure on public services, then attention often falls on the public-private sector wage differential. Estimated with longitudinal employer-employee data for the years 2002-16 in the United Kingdom, among men there was no significant public sector wage premium. However,...

We contribute to the discussion on betting market efficiency by studying the odds (or prices) set by fifty-one online bookmakers, for the result outcomes in over 16,000 association football matches in England since 2010. Adapting a methodology typically used to evaluate forecast efficiency, we...

We use representative payroll data from Great Britain to document novel facts about nominal wage adjustments, focusing on workers who stayed in the same firm and job from one year to the next. The richness of these data allows us to analyse basic pay and the other components of earnings, such as...

We study the determinants of superstar wage effects, asking whether productivity or popularity-based explanations are more appropriate. We use longitudinal wage and performance data for workers (players) and firms (teams) from a particular market for sports talent: Major League Soccer (MLS) in...