Economics Research

Mobolaji Alabi (ICMA) - "The financial impact of Financial Fair Play regulation: Evidence from the English Premier League" - PhD Seminar
2020-12-03 13:45 - 14:30 (Europe/London) | Microsoft Teams
Abstract
In response to the ailing financial situation of European Football clubs, UEFA introduced Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulation in 2011 to guide clubs towards profitability and sustainability. The existing literature is inundated with the impacts of FFP on footballing competitiveness. However, this study focuses on FFP’s impact on financial performance. The English Premier League (EPL) – with the highest losses and debt level in Europe pre-FFP – is an excellent scene to assess the effectiveness of FFP. Drawing on financial data of 37 football clubs in the EPL and applying difference-in-differences quasi-experiment, we measure the effectiveness of the regulation. We find statistical significance for improved profitability; however, solvency is yet to experience similar improvements. We believe our findings and subsequent regulatory recommendations can further improve the financial performance of football clubs.

Sofia Paklina (ROSES)
2020-12-04 14:30 - 16:00
Title:
Referee Bias and International Relations
About ROSES:

An online series of sport economics seminars, organised by James Reade, Carl Singleton and Adrian Bell, part of the Football Economics Research Group at the University of Reading.
All Seminars take place 2:30-4pm, UK time, and will take place on Microsoft Teams.

Joining Instructions:

Seminar via Microsoft Teams. Contact James Reade at j.j.reade@reading.ac.uk

Anh Nguyen (ICMA) - "The real impact of sovereign rating changes: Sovereign ceiling or crowding out of public debts?" - PhD Seminar
2020-12-10 13:00 - 13:45 | Microsoft Teams
Abstract
This paper investigates the impacts of sovereign ratings on domestic corporate investments. Based on a sample of 1757 non-financial firms in 51 countries from 1994 to 2018, we find significant impacts of sovereign ratings on domestic investments, after controlling for corporate creditworthiness. Specifically, firms domiciled in a recently downgraded sovereign reduce investments by 32%, even if their credit ratings are unchanged following the negative sovereign rating event. There is no evidence of increases in firms’ investments following sovereign upgrades. Further investigations reveal that a crowding out effect of government debts is an important channel for corporate-sovereign rating spillovers. Public debt overhangs exacerbate negative impacts of sovereign downgrades on corporate investing activities.

Roger Titford (ROSES)
2020-12-11 14:30 - 16:00
Title:
England’s first football boom 1872-1914 and its 21st century parallels
About ROSES:

An online series of sport economics seminars, organised by James Reade, Carl Singleton and Adrian Bell, part of the Football Economics Research Group at the University of Reading.
All Seminars take place 2:30-4pm, UK time, and will take place on Microsoft Teams.

Joining Instructions:

Seminar via Microsoft Teams. Contact James Reade at j.j.reade@reading.ac.uk

Georgios Nalbantis (ROSES)
2020-12-18 14:30 - 16:00
Title:
Substitution effects between international soccer telecasts
About ROSES:

An online series of sport economics seminars, organised by James Reade, Carl Singleton and Adrian Bell, part of the Football Economics Research Group at the University of Reading.
All Seminars take place 2:30-4pm, UK time, and will take place on Microsoft Teams.

Joining Instructions:

Seminar via Microsoft Teams. Contact James Reade at j.j.reade@reading.ac.uk

Georg Stadtmann (ROSES)
2021-01-08 14:30 - 16:00
Title:
Fortnite: The Business Model Pattern Behind the Scene
About ROSES:

An online series of sport economics seminars, organised by James Reade, Carl Singleton and Adrian Bell, part of the Football Economics Research Group at the University of Reading.
All Seminars take place 2:30-4pm, UK time, and will take place on Microsoft Teams.

Joining Instructions:

Seminar via Microsoft Teams. Contact James Reade at j.j.reade@reading.ac.uk

Mario Lackner (ROSES)
2021-01-15 14:30 - 16:00
Title:
Do male managers increase risk-taking of female teams? Evidence from the NCAA
About ROSES:

An online series of sport economics seminars, organised by James Reade, Carl Singleton and Adrian Bell, part of the Football Economics Research Group at the University of Reading.
All Seminars take place 2:30-4pm, UK time, and will take place on Microsoft Teams.

Joining Instructions:

Seminar via Microsoft Teams. Contact James Reade at j.j.reade@reading.ac.uk

Michael Simmons (RHUL) "Pre-layoff search" - PhD Seminar
2021-01-21 13:00 - 13:45 | Microsoft Teams
See Michael’s personal website here
Abstract
Are workers able to foresee job loss? If so, how many and how far in advance? In this paper, I document the extent to which workers change their search behaviour before job loss in the UK. In particular, for low and high skill workers, search incidence increases by 17and 32 percentage points, respectively, during the quarter that precedes job loss, and this increased incidence is predominantly due to workers “thinking their job may end”. Equipped with this information, I build a search model of the labour market with stochastic human capital, where workers may receive information of job insecurity, and are able to respond by picking their search effort and savings. I show that that the dynamics of pre-layoff search pins down key parameters governing the changes in the average worker’s information set prior to unemployment. The model estimates reveal that, 50% and 67% of low and high skill workers, respectively, know of impending job loss on average about three months before becoming unemployed. As well as fitting the dynamics of pre-layoff search, the model is also able to replicate the level of involuntary job switching, and the costs of job loss for workers who immediately find new employment and for workers who do not. I decompose the difference sin the costs of job loss into the underlying forces at play. I find that the smaller costs of job loss for those managing to switch employers, relative to those who transition into unemployment, are predominantly due to workers avoiding skill loss in unemployment. Counterfactual analysis shows that if workers were unable to foresee job loss, the unemployment rate would rise by 20% and consumption would fall by over 1%. The results reveal that increasing search following the pre-layoff warning is far more valuable to the worker than to increase savings. Finally, I use the model to understand the implications for salient policies, designed to mitigate the costs of job loss.

Muayad Ismail "Distributional and Welfare Effects of IMF Programs in Sudan" - PhD Seminar
2021-01-21 13:45 - 14:30 | Microsoft Teams
Abstract
This research aims at evaluating the distributional and welfare effects of IMF programs implemented in Sudan during the period 1960-2018. This research is expected to contribute to the current debate about the potential social impact of the ongoing IMF program in Sudan and implications for the very difficult political transition following regime change. It generally examines the validity of various claims in the literature that Fund programs are harmful for income distribution and growth. Specifically, the research evaluates the efficacy of these assumptions and the costs of IMF programs in terms of increasing income inequality and reducing per capita income for Sudanese during or after programs. To this effect, the study will use a combination of quantitative methods, including Vector Auto-regressive models (VAR) and Generalized Method of Moments. The paper will also extend the analysis to cover the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region to further strengthen the robustness of the results.

S-TRAINING-ROSES @ 3PM Laurent Malisoux (ROSES)
2021-01-22 14:30 - 16:00
Title:
Shoe cushioning, body mass and running biomechanics as risk factors for running injury: A randomised trial with 800+ recreational runners
About ROSES:

An online series of sport economics seminars, organised by James Reade, Carl Singleton and Adrian Bell, part of the Football Economics Research Group at the University of Reading.
All Seminars take place 2:30-4pm, UK time, and will take place on Microsoft Teams.

Joining Instructions:

Seminar via Microsoft Teams. Contact James Reade at j.j.reade@reading.ac.uk

Alex Vickery (RHUL) "Reaching for the SKY: Parental Investments in Academic Skills and Competition for University Places" - PhD Seminar
2021-01-28 13:00 - 13:45 | Microsoft Teams
See Alex’s personal website here
Abstract
I study the development of child academic skills through adolescence in anticipation of entry to university. I look at how heterogeneity in initial household income and child skills affects parents’ decisions to invest in private education for their child, and how the resulting choices contribute to inequality in university admissions in the first instance, and also to lower social mobility in terms of lifetime earnings. I use a non-linear factor approach to estimate human capital production functions that are placed within an equilibrium framework to account for the fact that places at top universities are highly attractive but also limited. I find that there are strong complementarities between different academic skills and that private education in one subject can have strong spillover effects on the accumulation of skills in cognate subjects. The implied equilibrium competition for limited places at top universities strongly contributes to low inter-generational social mobility, and, conversely, policies that would limit competition could improve equality and the allocation of talent.

Yongda Liu (ICMA) "Internal Information Quality and Financial Policy Peer Effects" - PhD Seminar
2021-01-28 13:45 - 14:30 | Microsoft Teams
Abstract
This paper investigates how firms’ internal information quality influences the peer effects in its financial policy. By employing earning announcement speed and insider trading profitability difference as measurements, we find that firms with low internal information quality have a high propensity of mimicking the capital structure decision of its product market peers and, by doing so, firms’ operating performance suffers. Our further analysis shows that poor information quality could amplify the agency problem, therefore inducing more peer mimicking.

Marius Otting (ROSES)
2021-01-29 14:30 - 16:00
Title:
Exploratory analysis of in-game betting dynamics
About ROSES:

An online series of sport economics seminars, organised by James Reade, Carl Singleton and Adrian Bell, part of the Football Economics Research Group at the University of Reading.
All Seminars take place 2:30-4pm, UK time, and will take place on Microsoft Teams.

Joining Instructions:

Seminar via Microsoft Teams. Contact James Reade at j.j.reade@reading.ac.uk

James Reade (Internal Seminar)
2021-02-01 13:00 - 14:00
Title: Disparate Sporting Topics: Expert Forecasts and No Shows
Abstract: This talk combines two separate pieces of research that are not obviously linked other than that they look at sport. The first considers a novel dataset of German expert forecasts of football match scorelines. Forecasts from 25 experts (21 male, 4 female, including famous former footballers and at least one rapper) are collected for over 400 matches over a year and a half, and analysed in terms of their success, but also tentatively the information that each uses. The second topic is the phenomenon of no shows – fans that buy tickets for an event but then do not attend. This is distinct behaviour from that of fans that actually attend. We don’t observe individual level data, but we do have data from Reading FC since 2004 on the number of no shows at each matches, alongside various other characteristics (total tickets sold, total in attendance, home and away spectators).
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Arlan Brucal (External Seminar)
2021-02-03 14:30 - 16:00
Title: Assessing the impact of energy prices on plant-level environmental and economic performance: Evidence from Indonesian manufacturers (joint w/ Antoine Dechezleprêtre)
Abstract: The paper investigates the impact of policy-induced higher energy prices on the environmental performance and competitiveness of Indonesian firms using plant-level data covering all medium and large enterprises in the Indonesian manufacturing industry for the period 1980-2015. The study exploits geographic, industrial and temporal energy price variations to identify the causal effect of price increases on the performance of firms. Preliminary results show that a 10% energy price increase induces a reduction in energy use by 5.23%, higher than most estimates in developed-country settings, with minimal effect on average employment. In response to energy price shocks, Indonesian plants tend to update their capital stock towards more energy-efficient and/or energy-saving machineries and vehicles. Our approach also highlights the importance of considering not only surviving firms but also entry and exit when analysing the effects of energy price policies. At the micro-level, we find that higher energy prices increase the likelihood of plant exits. This kind of response is higher in magnitude for plants that are relatively more energy intensive.
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Ran Tao (ICMA) "News-Based Links and Cross-firm Return Predictability" - PhD Seminar
2021-02-04 13:00 - 13:45 | Microsoft Teams
Abstract
Applying a “co-coverage” concept to the Dow Jones Newswire articles, we propose to identify each firm’s news-based links (NBLs) and thereby construct a newsworthiness economic grouping scheme. The advantage of NBLs is to capture the up-to-date relative importance of different economic links between a base firm and its peers. We show that a base firm’s share price responses persistently to the shock transmitted from its industry peers reweighted by the NBLs. Additional empirical tests show that the relative importance of those NBLs is not immediately clear to the investors and therefore is reflected sluggishly in the return shock from NBL peers to the base firms. Taken together, our results suggest that monitoring news co-coverage plays an important role in understanding the cross-firm return predictability documented in the literature

Konstantina Boutsioukou (RHUL) "Parental background and access to tertiary education in Greece: Changes in times of crisis" - PhD seminar
2021-02-04 13:45 - 14:30 | Microsoft Teams
Abstract
In this study I explore how university entry patterns in Greece were affected by the debt crisis over the period 2008-2016. In particular, I study the distribution of educational participation in elite university programmes in Greece and examine whether the link between parental background and admission to elite university programmes has changed as a result of the economic recession that hit Greece in 2009. I use individual-level data for admissions to every undergraduate university program in Greece for nine rounds of admission cohorts (2008-2016) and data on the university admission thresholds (2008-2016) for every undergraduate university programme, recording the minimum score required for entry. I find that students from higher educational backgrounds are more likely to be admitted to elite departments such as medicine, law and engineering compared to students from poorer educational backgrounds. However, the results indicate that the socioeconomic gradient of entry into the elite programmes has become flatter over the years of the crisis.

Nathan Ashby (ROSES)
2021-02-05 14:30 - 16:00
Title:
Big Swimmer in a Small Pond or Small Swimmer in a Big Pond? Evidence of Peer Effects from High School Competition Realignments
About ROSES:

An online series of sport economics seminars, organised by James Reade, Carl Singleton and Adrian Bell, part of the Football Economics Research Group at the University of Reading.
All Seminars take place 2:30-4pm, UK time, and will take place on Microsoft Teams.

Joining Instructions:

Seminar via Microsoft Teams. Contact James Reade at j.j.reade@reading.ac.uk

Steven Bosworth (Internal Seminar)
2021-02-08 13:00 - 14:00
Title: Parental time investments and instantaneous well-being in the United States (with Almudena Sevilla and Ignacio Gimenez-Nadal)
Abstract: We use the Well-being Modules of the American Time Use Survey to document that, despite spending about 30 minutes more in child care per day, higher educated mothers report lower levels of instantaneous well-being than less-educated mothers during child-related activities. Our results hold after controlling for a wide set of cofounders, including life satisfaction. We present an identity economics model of “intensive mothering” to explain these findings: mothers with high education relative to a reference group select into an identity which places high value on human capital outcomes. This identity confers high social prestige but requires costly investments to maintain a separating equilibrium. Consistent with the model, we find that the education gradient in maternal instantaneous well-being is unique to child care activities. There is no education gradient during non-child-related activities, among fathers or among non-mothers.
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Peter Spittal (External Seminar)
2021-02-10 14:30 - 16:00
Title: Benefit salience and labour supply
Abstract: I study the salience of dynamic features of the welfare system. I estimate labour supply responses to a large, lump-sum and foreseeable reduction in benefit income arising from children ageing out of eligibility for Child Tax Credit—a major welfare programme in the UK. I show that the rules governing eligibility are non-salient, despite the high financial stakes, and that claimants learn about them through experience. The results also rule out a broad set of alternative mechanisms which are indistinguishable from salience effects in static settings. I then develop a structural life-cycle labour supply model in which individuals may be unaware of the benefit eligibility rules, using the empirical results to identify key parameters in the model. The model estimates suggest that nearly 82 percent of claimants are initially unaware of the benefit eligibility rules. And the resulting optimisation errors have substantial welfare costs—equivalent to a 14 percent reduction in income from the programme, with no offsetting benefits to the government. The findings identify a new source of inefficiency in the welfare system, and highlight the importance of recognising that dynamic features of policy may be non-salient.
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Luqman Saeed (RHUL) "Political and Economic Consequences of Humanitarian Military Interventions Abstract" - PhD Seminar
2021-02-11 13:00 - 13:45 | Microsoft Teams
Abstract
This study investigates the impact of humanitarian military interventions (HMIs) on conflict termination, conflict escalation, economic output and democratic performance using panel data on 144 countries covering time-period of 1960-2018. Scholars are divided over whether HMIs are an effective means of enforcing peace and establishing economic and political stabilities. This contribution is empirical, and it exploits a new database on HMIs in post second world war period developed by the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt. The results from multivariate analyses suggest that biased HMIs have deteriorating impact on conflict whereas neutral interventions have positive impact on conflict termination. In particular, interventions which are biased against rebels, tend to escalate conflict. Neutral interventions have no significant negative impact on output whereas HMIs biased against governments and rebels lead to around 9 -8 percent decrease in per capita output. Finally, neutral and against governments HMIs lead to increase in democracy score. These results are consistent in both contemporaneous and long-run decaying modes and also in IV regressions.

Ryan Pinheiro (ROSES)
2021-02-12 14:30 - 16:00
Title:
All Runs Are Created Equal: Labor Market Efficiency in Major League Baseball
About ROSES:

An online series of sport economics seminars, organised by James Reade, Carl Singleton and Adrian Bell, part of the Football Economics Research Group at the University of Reading.
All Seminars take place 2:30-4pm, UK time, and will take place on Microsoft Teams.

Joining Instructions:

Seminar via Microsoft Teams. Contact James Reade at j.j.reade@reading.ac.uk

S-TRAINING-ROSES @ 3pm (ROSES)
2021-02-19 14:30 - 16:00
Title:
TBC
About ROSES:

An online series of sport economics seminars, organised by James Reade, Carl Singleton and Adrian Bell, part of the Football Economics Research Group at the University of Reading.
All Seminars take place 2:30-4pm, UK time, and will take place on Microsoft Teams.

Joining Instructions:

Seminar via Microsoft Teams. Contact James Reade at j.j.reade@reading.ac.uk

Meshael Batarfi "What differences are there between male and female managers? Evidence from elite women’s soccer" - PhD Seminar
2021-02-22 13:00 - 2021-02-25 13:45 | Microsoft Teams
Abstract
We investigate male and female managers in a highly competitive and data-rich setting: association football. While in men’s football there is minimal gender variation in the high-profile roles, in women’s football men often take up top management positions; indeed in our dataset 75.18 % of the 14,000 national and international matches between 1983 and 2020 involved at least one team coached by a male manager. We find significant differences between male and female coaches in a number of the measured characteristics indicating differences in risk preferences.

Shahabeddin Gharaati (RHUL) "The welfare effects of introducing a tax on a collateralized loan" - PhD Seminar
2021-02-25 13:45 - 14:30 | Microsoft Teams
Abstract

In this paper, I examine the effects of introducing a tax on social welfare in models with collateral and default. Two models are considered. The first model incorporates default and collateral in a standard two-period general equilibrium with incomplete markets; the second is a model with a continuum of investors in the binomial economy who have different beliefs about the asset’s price. The individual that issues the security pays tax in the first period, then all agents receive a transfer in the second period. In both models, the borrower demand for the collateralizable durable good decreases. The borrower is worse off due to an increase in the interest rate and a negative income effect. On the other hand, a taxation policy benefits the lender through the effect of the tax on the equilibrium interest rate and the equilibrium price of the durable good. In the model with different beliefs, the utilitarian welfare function always increases; however, in the standard model, the social welfare function increase depends on the distribution of endowments of the perishable good in the first period.

Peter Dolton (ROSES)
2021-02-26 14:30 - 16:00
Title:
Is Football a Matter of Life and Death – Or is it more Important than that?
About ROSES:

An online series of sport economics seminars, organised by James Reade, Carl Singleton and Adrian Bell, part of the Football Economics Research Group at the University of Reading.
All Seminars take place 2:30-4pm, UK time, and will take place on Microsoft Teams.

Joining Instructions:

Seminar via Microsoft Teams. Contact James Reade at j.j.reade@reading.ac.uk

Evripidis Bantis (ICMA) "Forecasting GDP Growth Rates Using Google Trends in the United States and Brazil" - PhD Seminar
2021-03-04 13:00 - 13:45 | Microsoft Teams
Abstract
There are many studies that explore the usefulness of “Big Data” in forecasting specific economic variables such as unemployment or inflation, but only a few focus on the overall economic activity. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to nowcast GDP growth rates by using a dynamic factor model based on traditional economic indicators as well as on Google search data. Our analysis covers Brazil and the United States over the period of 2005-2019. Moreover, we employ several variable selection methods to investigate whether factor models with targeted predictors provide forecast gains when utilizing high dimensional datasets. Empirical results show that factor models with targeted predictors based on both economic indicators and Google search data provide forecast gains compared to factor models that are based only on economic indicators. When we isolate the source of forecast improvements, we find that pre-selecting predictors indeed matters, but gains appear mostly in forecast horizons and tend to vanish as we move to nowcasting and backcasting horizons. Finally, only the main Google Trends categories provide forecast benefits, while they appear to perform better for the United States rather than in Brazil.

Rob Simmons (ROSES)
2021-03-05 14:30 - 16:00

Anna Zabrodzka "Convergence Across EU Regions and the Role of the EU Cohesion Policy" - PhD Seminar
2021-03-11 13:00 - 13:45 | Microsoft Teams
Abstract
While there is evidence that the poorest regions in the European Union experienced the fastest economic growth, the gap between the richest and the poorest has not diminished. Additionally, after more than 30 years of intervention, there is no clear and conclusive evidence that the EU Cohesion Policy has effectively contributed to economic development across the disadvantaged Europe and ensured rising equality across the continent. The inconclusive or often contradictory results of the existing studies warrant further investigation. The aim of this study is to contribute to the discussion and evaluate the macroeconomic impact of the EU Cohesion Policy on the growth of European regions and the process of economic convergence. The study attempts to answer the following question – Is there evidence that the EU structural funds supported economic growth and in turn convergence process among European subnational regions? – by using cross-section, panel and dynamic panel analysis and the newly available dataset on annual payments provided by the European Commission. The main contribution of this paper is the expansion of the data sample by the 2007-2014 programming period and inclusion of the regions in the Central and Eastern Europe, which joined the EU in 2004 and 2007, in the investigation.

Jingqi Pan (ICMA) "On the estimation of Value-at-risk and Expected Shortfall at extreme levels" - PhD Seminar
2021-03-11 13:45 - 14:30 | Microsoft Teams
Abstract
The estimation of risk at extreme levels of significance (such as alpha = 0.01%) can be crucial considering events such as those related to the recent COVID-19 crisis. We extend two popular dynamic semi-parametric models of Patton (2019) that jointly estimate Value-at-Risk (VaR) and Expected Shortfall (ES), specifically the one-factor GAS model and the Hybrid GAS/GARCH model. The main idea of our approach is to estimate VaR and ES for two levels of alpha simultaneously, namely for an extreme level and for a more common level (such as 10%). Our simulation results indicate that the proposed models outperform the benchmarks in terms of in-sample loss values, out-of-sample loss and backtest rejections for extreme values of alpha. In an empirical study, we apply the proposed augmented GAS model and the augmented Hybrid GAS/GARCH model to energy futures prices (WTI, Brent, Gas oil and Heating oil) and compare them with a range of parametric, nonparametric and semiparametric models. Our results show that both augmented GAS models generally outperform the benchmark models, and the outperformance is even more prominent during the COVID-19 crisis.
