FiT Publishing

This study examines home advantage in German handball, focusing on the impact of varying attendance due to COVID-19. Like in other sports, home advantage is acknowledged in handball, but the audience’s impact on it remained unexplored. Analyzing data from 3,235 matches of the first and second German handball Bundesliga, we find a statistical home advantage consistent with prior research. During the pandemic, we identify a significant decrease in home advantage without spectators in the first division, while the second division remains unaffected. This applies to both the winning...Read more

Previous research has determined that home field advantage (HFA) is positively related to crowd density. Isolating this effect is a substantial empirical challenge as crowd density is endogenous with home win-likelihood via fan interest. We consider a natural-experimental setting that introduces exogenous crowd-density variation into National Football League (NFL) games. COVID-19 safety protocols allow us to disentangle crowd-presence, crowd-density, and built-environment effects upon HFA. We find strong evidence that crowd presence is a significant, substantial source of HFA, but crowd...Read more

Home advantage has been documented in many sports. It is hypothesized that higher attendance, likely dominated by home-team supporters, can be a source of this advantage, either through influence on match officials or by spurring the home team to greater efforts relative to the away team. We examine this latter hypothesis using a dataset of 1,030 matches over eight seasons, 2012/2013 to 2019/2020, of the Pro14, one of the three major European rugby union leagues. Our results initially display strong evidence of home advantage. However, once we control for team quality, home advantage is...Read more

This paper examines whether sports betting markets are semi-strong form efficient—i.e., whether new information is rapidly and completely incorporated into betting prices. We use news on ghost games in the top European football leagues due to the COVID-19 pandemic as a clean arrival of new public information. Because spectators are absent during ghost games, the home advantage is reduced, and we test whether this information is fully reflected in betting prices. Our results show that bookmakers and betting exchanges systematically overestimated a home team’s winning probability during the...Read more

In recent years it has become increasingly popular to exploit the rich data available from sporting contests to obtain insights about important questions within business, finance, and economics. One question, which has been studied extensively using data from primarily soccer teams, is whether managerial turnover affects firm performance. But as in the more traditional literature in finance (e.g., Khanna & Poulsen, 1995; Weisbach, 1988) no clear consensus has been reached thus far.Read more

Home advantage in football varies over time. Existing theories of home advantage struggle to explain this time-series variation. We argue that the decline in home advantage in English football since the mid-1980s was partly caused by the advent of televised football. We argue that the increase in live television coverage of football matches has worked to incentivize players to not to shirk when playing in away games, as supporters can now more effectively monitor their efforts. We test this hypothesis using both time-series and panel-data econometrics.Read more