FiT Publishing

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