Background
The economics of sport is both the application of economics to sport, and the use of sport to inform economics. The former is often thought about in terms of “moneyball”, “sabremetrics” or “sport analytics”, but need not only relate to issues of recruitment and on-field tactics – important strategic decisions that they are. Other aspects of sports club and league management and organisation are very much part of the purview of applying economics to sport. In our cluster we have economists looking at both of these dimensions – an example of the latter being the modelling of disaggregated attendance demand numbers at sporting events, and considering the impact of sport on measured crime and other economic indicators.
Our Members
- Academics at Reading:
- Affiliate members:
- PhD students:
- Shahd Sedrani
- Tazio Panzani (joint with Davide Castellani at University of Perugia)
Publications
Recent publications:
- Can awareness reduce (and reverse) identity-driven bias in judgement? Evidence from international cricket (Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2024)
- It’s just not cricket: the uncontested toss and the gentleman’s game (In: Butler, R. (ed.) Advances in Sports Economics, 2021)
- On fixing international cricket matches (The Journal of Gambling Business and Economics, 2020)
- “Causal effects of an absent crowd on performances and refereeing decisions during Covid-19” (Economics Letters, 2020)
- “Stadium attendance demand during the COVID-19 crisis: Early empirical evidence from Belarus” (Applied Economics Letters, 2020)
- “Demand for Public Events in the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Case Study of European Football” (European Sport Management Quarterly, 2020)
- “Evaluating Strange Forecasts: The Curious Case of Football Match Scorelines” (Scottish Journal of Political Economy, 2020)
- “Betting markets for English Premier League results and scorelines: evaluating a simple forecasting model” (Economic Issues, 2020)
- “Going with your Gut: The (In)accuracy of Forecast Revisions in a Football Score Prediction Game” (Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 2020)
- “Information, prices and efficiency in an online betting market” (Finance Research Letters, 2020)
- “The wisdom of amateur crowds: Evidence from an online community of sports tipsters” (European Journal of Operational Research, 2019)
Events
- Current projects:
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- Scorecasting: Forecasting scorelines in football matches; James
- The efficiency of prediction (betting) markets and forecast evaluation; James, Philip and Shixuan
- Cricket: Extracting information from cricket scorecards to understand various issues and economic behaviour; Sarah and James
- Lessons from the market for football talent, incuding superstar wages; Adesola
- Institutions and sport: Investigating the extent to which institutional organisation affects sporting outcomes; Meshael and James.
- Forthcoming events:
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- March-December 2020, Reading Online Sport Economics Seminars (ROSES). Programme
- July 2020 6th HSE-NES-Reading Football and Finance Conference in St Petersburg
- July 2021 7th HSE-NES-Reading Football and Finance Conference in Reading
- Past events
Research Led Teaching