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on Sports and Economics |
| By: | L\'aszl\'o Csat\'o; D\'ora Gr\'eta Petr\'oczy |
| Abstract: | Penalty shootouts play an important role in the knockout stage of major football tournaments, especially since the 2021/22 season, when the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) scrapped the away goals rule in its club competitions. Inspired by this rule change, our paper examines whether the outcome of a penalty shootout can be predicted in UEFA club competitions. Based on all shootouts between 2000 and 2025, we find no evidence for the effect of the kicking order, the field of the match, or psychological momentum. In contrast to previous results, stronger teams, defined first by Elo ratings, do not perform better than their weaker opponents. Consequently, penalty shootouts are equivalent to a perfect lottery in top European football. |
| Date: | 2025–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2510.17641 |
| By: | Kuhlemann, Jana (Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES), University of Mannheim); Kosyakova, Yuliya (Institute for Employment Research (IAB), Nuremberg, Germany) |
| Abstract: | "This study investigates the role of engaging in physical leisure activities in facilitating refugees’ structural integration through enhancing their social capital, destination-language proficiency, and health. The physical fitness gained from such activities can also be crucial for securing physically demanding jobs. As employment significantly influences refugees’ social integration, this research specifically examines the impact of the intensity and regularity of sports engagement on employment outcomes among refugees from the 2015/16 influx in Germany. Utilizing longitudinal data from the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees, findings reveal that regular and more intensive engagement in physical leisure activities increases refugees’ chances of securing gainful employment and obtaining physically demanding jobs in the subsequent year. However, sports involvement does not correlate with higher occupational prestige, potentially locking them into lower-status jobs. Additionally, time spent in other types of leisure activities shows a slightly negative association with labor market outcomes, underscoring the unique benefits of sports. This points to the dual-edged nature of sports as an integration tool – beneficial in fostering initial labor market entry but possibly limiting in terms of career advancement." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en)) |
| Keywords: | IAB-Open-Access-Publikation |
| JEL: | I12 J15 J24 J61 Z13 Z20 |
| Date: | 2025–10–23 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iab:iabdpa:202515 |
| By: | Xiao, Leon Y. (IT University of Copenhagen) |
| Abstract: | Background: Playing video games is a popular activity globally across age groups. Concerns have been raised about potentially problematic engagement both in terms of spending too much time (‘gaming disorder’ as defined by the World Health Organization) and money, including on gambling-like in-game purchases, such as loot boxes. Giving games different advisory age ratings based on their potentially problematic content and advising consumers and parents as to what age group the game is suitable for is a non-restrictive policy approach that is widely adopted internationally. In contrast, aiming to address ‘internet addiction’ and ‘excessive monetary spending, ’ East Asian countries have adopted (and in the South Korean case since repealed) stricter legal restrictions on how long and when young people can play video games for and how much money they are permitted to spend. These restrictions are enforced by software means through age assurance and identity verification procedures. A prominent example is how Mainland China restricts under-18s from playing online games except for one hour only between 8–9 PM on Fridays, weekends, and public holidays. Different monetary spending limits are also imposed against children based on age groups. Previous research presented conflicting evidence as to whether restrictions on gameplay time were beneficial, suggesting some young people circumvent the restrictions. Objective: Policy implementation evidence can inform both future domestic and international policymaking (including repealing ineffective policies). Whether and how major technology companies implement age ratings, age assurance, and identity verification procedures to enforce video game-related regulatory restrictions in Mainland China were novelly assessed. Methods: The 100 highest-grossing Mainland Chinese iPhone games on 5 January 2024 per data.ai formed the sample. For each game, any age rating-related information was recorded, and the presence of any identity verification procedure was determined through content analysis of the account creation process. Results: Confusingly, two age rating systems often providing conflicting information were presented simultaneously to Mainland Chinese consumers. As required, 95.0% of games conducted identity verification. However, 5.0% of games were accessible without the user having been required to complete identity verification processes, in breach of regulations. Conclusions: The implementation of a single, unified, and culturally appropriate age rating system that includes an adult-only rating would ensure better child protection. The currently widely adopted identity verification process has many flaws, including being easily circumventable. Actionable improvements, such as transmitting sensitive personal data only to a third-party identity verification provider rather than many individual video game companies, are recommended. The age assurance-related policy implementation insights from the Mainland Chinese video game restriction context are also relevant to technology regulation globally: many other countries are depending on such software solutions to address online harms young people might encounter, ranging from pornography to online gambling. |
| Date: | 2025–10–22 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:lawarc:uqbf9_v2 |
| By: | Arunava Patra; C. F. Sagar Zephania; Sagar Chakraborty |
| Abstract: | In a mix of prejudiced and unprejudiced individuals engaged in strategic interactions, the individual intensity of prejudice is expected to have effect on overall level of societal prejudice. High level of prejudice should lead to discrimination that may manifest as unfairness and, perhaps, even spite. In this paper, we investigate this idea in the classical paradigm of the ultimatum game which we theoretically modify to introduce prejudice at the level of players, terming its intensity as prejudicity. The stochastic evolutionary game dynamics, in the regime of replication-selection, reveals the emergence of spiteful behaviour as a dominant behaviour via a first order phase transition -- a discontinuous jump in the frequency of spiteful individuals at a threshold value of prejudicity. The phase transition is quite robust and becomes progressively conspicuous in the limit of large population size where deterministic evolutionary game dynamics, viz., replicator dynamics, approximates the system closely. The emergence of spite driven by prejudice is also found to persist when one considers long-term evolutionary dynamics in the mutation-selection dominated regime. |
| Date: | 2025–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2510.18889 |
| By: | Rui Gon\c{c}alves; Vitor Miguel Ribeiro; Roman Chertovskih; Ant\'onio Pedro Aguiar |
| Abstract: | This study presents the implementation of a short-term forecasting system for price movements in exchange markets, using market depth data and a systematic procedure to enable a fully automated trading system. The case study focuses on the UK to Win Horse Racing market during the pre-live stage on the world's leading betting exchange, Betfair. Innovative convolutional attention mechanisms are introduced and applied to multiple recurrent neural networks and bi-dimensional convolutional recurrent neural network layers. Additionally, a novel padding method for convolutional layers is proposed, specifically designed for multivariate time series processing. These innovations are thoroughly detailed, along with their execution process. The proposed architectures follow a standard supervised learning approach, involving model training and subsequent testing on new data, which requires extensive pre-processing and data analysis. The study also presents a complete end-to-end framework for automated feature engineering and market interactions using the developed models in production. The key finding of this research is that all proposed innovations positively impact the performance metrics of the classification task under examination, thereby advancing the current state-of-the-art in convolutional attention mechanisms and padding methods applied to multivariate time series problems. |
| Date: | 2025–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2510.16008 |