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...

This paper examines the relation between crowd support and home advantage in professional football in making use of a unique “natural experiment” induced by restrictions due to the Corona pandemic: so-called ghost games in the top three German football divisions during the 2019/2020 season....

Betting markets have been frequently used as a natural laboratory to test the efficient market hypothesis and to obtain insights especially for financial markets. We add to this literature in analyzing the velocity and accuracy in which market expectations adapt to an exogenous shock: the...

This paper examines the relation between crowd support and home advantage in professional soccer. For that purpose, we make use of a unique "natural experiment": so-called ghost games in the three top divisions of German professional soccer during the Corona pandemic. We find that there is a...

This paper examines the relation between crowd support and home advantage in professional football in making use of a unique “natural experiment” induced by restrictions due to the Corona pandemic: so-called ghost games in the top three German football divisions during the 2019/2020 season....

This paper considers the problem of forecasting real and financial macroeconomic variables across a large number of countries in the global economy. To this end, a global vector autoregressive (GVAR) model previously estimated over the 1979:Q1–2003:Q4 period by Dees, de Mauro, Pesaran, and...

We compare a number of data-rich prediction methods that are widely used in macroeconomic forecasting with a lesser known alternative: partial least squares (PLS) regression. In this method, linear, orthogonal combinations of a large number of predictor variables are constructed such that the...

We propose two new procedures for comparing the mean squared prediction error (MSPE) of a benchmark model to the MSPEs of a small set of alternative models that nest the benchmark. Our procedures compare the benchmark to all the alternative models simultaneously rather than sequentially, and do...

This paper evaluates models that exploit timely monthly releases to compute early estimates of current quarter GDP (now-casting) in the euro area. We compare traditional methods used at institutions with a new method proposed by Giannone, Reichlin, and Small (2005). The method consists in...

Factor based forecasting has been at the forefront of developments in the macroeconometric forecasting literature in the recent past. Despite the flurry of activity in the area, a number of specification issues such as the choice of the number of factors in the forecasting regression, the...