We study individuals who each chose to predict the outcome of fixed events in an online competition, namely all football matches during the 2017/18 season of the English Premier League. We ask whether any forecast revisions the individuals chose to make (or not), before the matches began,...

Two popular methods for aggregating individual forecasts are prediction markets, where participants bet on the outcome of future events, and forecasting contests, where participants are ranked according to the accuracy of their forecasts. Can these methods be used in concert to produce more...

This study uses data from elite-level European football matches and panel data methods to suggest how people responded to the initial COVID-19 outbreak. In Italy, England and Germany, stadium attendances were negatively affected by the previous day's newly confirmed domestic cases or deaths. In...

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...

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 revisit the magnitude of home advantage at the Summer and Winter Olympic Games, looking back all the way to Athens in 1896. By comparing a host country’s success with their performances in previous and subsequent games, we find that home advantage has declined over time as participation and...

The economics of sport and how sport provides insights into economics have experienced exogenous shocks from COVID-19, facilitating many natural experiments. These have provided partial answers to questions of: how airborne viruses may spread in crowds; how crowds respond to the risk and...

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...

Using the assignment of referees to European international association football matches played between 2002 and 2016, we ask whether judgements were biased according to the legacy of the Cold War. Referees from post-communist states favoured teams from non-communist states, but there was no...