Articles in this issue:

• Are Sports Betting Markets Semi-Strong Efficient? Evidence From the COVID-19 Pandemic

  Pascal Flurin Meier

  Raphael Flepp

  and Egon Franck

  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

• Soccer Clubs and Diminishing Returns: The Case of Paris Saint-Germain

  Vincent Hogan and Patrick Massey

  Paris Saint-Germain (PSG), one of France’s top soccer clubs, was bought by Qatar Sports Investments (QSI) in 2011. Since then, the club’s expenditure has risen precipitously, as have its victories. In this paper, we ask whether this represents value for money. We find that the efficiency of PSG did not deteriorate following the takeover. However, while PSG operated close to the production frontier in terms of converting resources to points, it scored vastly more points than was necessary to win the league. We estimate that PSG spent €140m more than was necessary to win the French league in...Read more

• Impacts of International Sports Events on the Stock Market: Evidence from the Announcement of the 18th Asian Games and 30th Southeast Asian Games

  Dwipraptono Agus Harjito

  Md. Mahmudul Alam

  and Rani Ayu Kusuma Dewi

  This paper assesses the influence of hosting major international sporting competitions on the host countries’ stock market performance before and after the announcement of such events. Specifically, this study explores whether stock markets of hosting countries experience cumulative average abnormal return (CAAR) during the aforementioned period. For the purposes of investigation, the study considers announcements of the 18th Asian Games and 30th Southeast Asian Games hosted by Indonesia and the Philippines, respectively. The LQ45 index of the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX) and PSEi index...Read more

• Baseball Home Field Advantage Without Fans in the Stands

  Jeremy M. Losak and Joseph Sabel

  Home field advantage is universally accepted across most major sports and levels of competition. However, exact causes of home field advantage have been difficult to disentangle. The COVID-19 pandemic offers a unique, natural experiment to isolate elements related to home field advantage since all 2020 regular season Major League Baseball games were played without fans. Results provide no statistically significant evidence of a difference in home field advantage between the 2019 and 2020 seasons, evidence that home crowd support is not a driver of home field advantage.There does appear to...Read more