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on Sports and Economics |
| By: | Florian Dorn; Marie-Theres Gasser; Kevin Kloiber; Simon Krause; Carla Krolage |
| Abstract: | Hosting mega-sports events generates optimistic projections of economic benefits, yet empirical evidence on actual local returns remains mixed. Focusing on the UEFA EURO 2024 in Germany, this paper provides causal evidence on the short-term local consumption effects of hosting mega-events. We leverage anonymized daily card spending data at the postcode level to measure changes in consumer spending. Using a difference-in-differences and a local projection framework, we document a statistically significant and economically meaningful 3% increase in consumer spending in host cities during the tournament. This effect is driven entirely by international visitors, whose spending increases by more than 6%, and is concentrated in the group stage and on match days. Domestic spending does not change on aggregate, but exhibits spatial displacement. The gains are highly concentrated in city centers and tourist-facing sectors. Overall, our findings provide policymakers with highly granular evidence on the localized economic effects of mega-sports events, highlighting how temporary demand shocks reshape intra-urban consumption patterns and concentrate gains in central, tourism-oriented areas. |
| Keywords: | EURO 2024, sports events, consumer spending, impact evaluation, microgeographic analysis |
| JEL: | Z20 R11 L83 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12555 |
| By: | Alexander Lehner; Giovanni Righetto |
| Abstract: | Brain drain -- the emigration of skilled individuals toward higher-wage economies -- is a well-documented phenomenon, yet its aggregate economic cost remains difficult to quantify because individual productivity is rarely observed. We offer a novel angle on this measurement challenge by studying professional football, a global labour market in which every participant carries a publicly observable, consistently estimated market value. Using data on over 92, 000 professional footballers worldwide from Transfermarkt, we identify nearly 20, 000 players with multi-national eligibility and compute the implied transfer of human capital between countries. We find that the resulting "leg drain" disproportionately benefits wealthy European nations -- France alone gains over EUR3 billion in player value -- while African and Caribbean countries bear the largest losses relative to GDP. Italy is the single largest net loser in absolute terms, driven by the outflow of players with Italian heritage to Latin American national teams. A gravity model of bilateral flows reveals that former colonial ties are among the strongest predictors of leg drain intensity: countries with a colonial relationship to a major European footballing nation lose significantly more player value, even after controlling for population and income. These findings provide a transparent, quantifiable analogue to the broader brain drain debate and highlight how historical institutional links continue to shape global talent redistribution. |
| Date: | 2026–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2603.17336 |
| By: | Johan Fourie; Krige Siebrits |
| Abstract: | Cricket's conventional wisdom holds that left-right batting partnerships disrupt bowlers by forcing constant line-and-length adjustments. We test this claim using ball-by-ball data from all men's international cricket: 96, 000 partnerships and 3.4 million deliveries across Tests, ODIs and T20Is. After controlling for batsman quality and absorbing match-innings fixed effects, the mixed-hand partnership premium is precisely zero in all three formats. The null extends to every partnership-level scoring margin and is confirmed by randomization inference. Per-ball dismissal risk is higher for mixed-hand pairs, offsetting any run-scoring advantage. Ball-level mechanism tests show that strike rotation imposes a universal switching cost on bowlers, but this cost does not interact with hand composition. An Oaxaca--Blinder decomposition reveals that the raw descriptive premium is largely explained by the superior quality of left-handed batsmen at the international level. One partial exception emerges in T20Is, where quantile regressions detect positive effects across the interquartile range (25th, 50th and 75th percentiles), suggesting a format-specific mechanism that warrants further investigation with larger samples from domestic T20 leagues. Our findings illustrate how apparent diversity benefits in team production can arise from composition effects rather than complementarity. |
| Keywords: | cricket, handedness, team selection, batting partnerships, diversity |
| JEL: | Z20 Z29 L83 D24 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sza:wpaper:wpapers395 |
| By: | Takahiro Suzuki; Michele Aleandri; Stefano Moretti |
| Abstract: | Ranking individuals based on their performance in different coalitions is a problem emerging in various domains (teams sports, scientific evaluation, argumentation, etc.). Often, for practical reasons, the number of comparable coalitions is limited. Therefore, the foundational principles of ranking solutions must support realistic interpretations in contexts where only certain coalitions can be compared. To address this issue, in this paper we present an axiomatic analysis of solutions for the social ranking problem centered on the notion of consistency. More precisely, we show that an appropriate notion of consistency, which specifies how to combine rankings on individuals across different rankings on coalitions, plays a key role in any axiomatic characterization, representing the true distinguishing feature of each solution. This role is further highlighted by the taxonomy of the complementary axioms used in our characterizations, which boil down to well-studied properties of invariance with respect to the label of players or coalitions, and also with respect to minor changes in a coalitional ranking. By showing the logical independence of the axioms used in each characterization, as well as a rigorous analysis of alternative notions of consistency with respect to the majority of solutions from the literature, this work attempts to provide a first systematic study of the social ranking problem over a variable domain of coalitions. |
| Date: | 2026–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2603.17578 |
| By: | Ranvir Rana; Viraj Nadkarni; Niusha Moshrefi; Pramod Viswanath |
| Abstract: | Prediction markets are powerful mechanisms for information aggregation, but existing designs are optimized for single-event contracts. In practice, traders frequently express beliefs about joint outcomes - through parlays in sports, conditional forecasts across related events, or scenario bets in financial markets. Current platforms either prohibit such trades or rely on ad hoc mechanisms that ignore correlation structure, resulting in inefficient prices and fragmented liquidity. We introduce ParlayMarket, the first automated market-making design that supports parlay-style joint contracts within a unified liquidity pool while maintaining coherent pricing across base markets and their combinations. Our main result is a convergence characterization of the resulting system. Under repeated trading, the AMM dynamics converge to a unique fixed point corresponding to the best approximation to the true joint distribution within the model class. We show that (i) parameter error remains bounded at stationarity due to a balance between signal and noise in trade-induced updates, and (ii) pricing error and monetary loss scale with this parameter error, implying that aggregate market-maker loss remains controlled and grows at most quadratically in the number of base markets. These results establish explicit limits on the information-retrieval error achievable through the trading interface. Importantly, parlay trades play a structural role in this convergence: by providing direct constraints on joint outcomes, they improve identifiability of dependence structure and reduce steady-state error relative to markets that rely only on marginal trades. Empirically, we show both in controlled simulations and in replay on historical Kalshi parlay data that this design achieves the intended scaling while remaining effective in realistic market settings. |
| Date: | 2026–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2603.22596 |