Carl Singleton

University of Stirling · Stirling Management School

Using UK employer-employee panel data, we present novel facts on how wages and working hours respond to the business cycle within jobs. Firms reacted to the Great Recession with substantial real wage cuts and by recruiting more part-time workers. A one percentage point increase in the unemployment rate led to an average decline in real hourly wages...

This study reports novel facts about the UK gender pay gap. We use a representative, longitudinal and linked employer–employee dataset for 2002–2016. Men's average log hourly wage was 22 points higher than women's in this period. We find that 16 per cent of this raw pay gap is accounted for by estimated firm‐specific wage effects. This is almost th...

The Covid-19 pandemic has induced worldwide natural experiments on the effects of crowds. We exploit one of these experiments that took place over several countries in almost identical settings: professional football matches played behind closed doors within the 2019/20 league seasons. We find large and statistically significant effects on the numb...

We use a series of historical natural experiments in association football to test whether social pressure from a home stadium crowd affected behavior and outcomes. The standout effect of an empty stadium was that referees cautioned visiting players less often, by over a third of a yellow card per match or once for every 22 fouls committed. Stadium...

We use over a decade of representative payroll data from Great Britain to study the nominal wage changes of employees who stayed in the same job for at least one year. We show that basic hourly pay drives the cyclicality of marginal labour costs, making this the most relevant measure of wages for macroeconomic models that incorporate wage rigidity....

There is an inverted u‐shaped relationship between age and wages in most labor markets, but the effects of age on productivity are often unclear. We use panel data in a market of high earners, professional footballers (soccer players) in North America, to estimate age‐productivity and age‐wage profiles. We find stark differences; wages increase for...

Using the assignment of referees to European international association football matches played between 2002 and 2016, we ask whether judgments were biased according to the legacy of the Cold War. We find that referees from post-communist states favored teams from non-communist states, but there was no evidence of favoritism in the other direction....

Competitions are often judged by officials, such as judges, juries, and referees. Systematic bias in those judgements is undesirable and sometimes related to social identity. In international cricket matches, biased judgements favouring home teams were documented when the umpires also originated from the home nation. Policymakers resolved this by e...

In December 2022, Cristiano Ronaldo, five-time Ballon d’Or winner and the most-followed person on Instagram, signed a reported €200million contract to play football in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) for two and a half years. This marked one of several recent ground-shaking and expensive interventions by the KSA in global sports markets. We explo...

This paper explores the relationships between natural resources, foreign direct investment (FDI) and the quality of national institutions, also known as “the rules of the game”. Using a data set of 69 developing countries over the period 1970–2015 to estimate a dynamic panel data model, we find negative and significant effects of natural resources...

The role of the National Statistical Institution (NSI) is changing, with many now making microdata available to researchers through secure research environments This provides NSIs with an opportunity to benefit from the methodological input from researchers who challenge the data in new ways This article uses the United Kingdom’s Annual Survey of H...

Bookmakers sell claims to bettors that depend on the outcomes of professional sports events. Like other financial assets, the wisdom of crowds could help sellers to price these claims more efficiently. We use the Wikipedia profile page views of professional tennis players involved in over 10,000 singles matches to construct a buzz factor. This meas...

This paper explores the relationships between natural resources, foreign direct investment (FDI) and the quality of national institutions, also known as ``the rules of the game''. Using a data set of 69 developing countries over the period 1970–2015 to estimate a dynamic panel data model, we find negative and significant effects of natural resource...

In less than a decade, the Egyptian Premier League has experienced three distinct changes between periods of competition in either crowded or empty stadiums. We exploit this unique sequence of natural experiments, to answer two questions neglected by the still emerging literature on the effects of crowds on behaviour and decision-making. First, doe...

News breaks cleanly in sports betting markets, making them laboratories for theories of asset pricing anomalies and risky behaviour. Using a dataset from a major European bookmaker, containing the volumes staked second-by-second on German Bundesliga football match outcomes, we test for evidence of momentum-following investing and pricing behaviour...

Economists have used Covid-19 as an exogenous shock to improve understanding of sports markets and in doing so gain broader economic insights. These natural experiments have provided partial answers to: how airborne viruses may spread in crowds; how people respond to the risk and information about infection; how the absence of crowds reduces the so...

The number of people consuming sporting events has long interested economists. Although imperfect, it is a measure of the demand for a 'peculiar' type of good or service - the sporting event. It also provides some measure of the social pressure on individuals performing. That pressure can be supportive, but it can also contribute to negative outcom...

Ethnicity wage gaps in Great Britain are large and have persisted over time. Previous studies of these gaps have been almost exclusively confined to analyses of household data, so they could not account for the role played by individual employers, despite growing evidence of their wage-setting power. We study ethnicity wage gaps using high quality...

Studies of financial market informational efficiency have proven burdensome in practice, because it is difficult to pinpoint when news breaks and is known by some or all the participants. We overcome this by designing a framework to detect mispricing, test informational efficiency and evaluate the behavioural biases within high-frequency prediction...

Bookmakers sell claims to bettors that depend on the outcomes of professional sports events. Like other financial assets, the wisdom of crowds could help sellers to price these claims more efficiently. We use the Wikipedia profile page views of professional tennis players involved in over ten thousand singles matches to construct a buzz factor. Thi...

Cricket offers a wealth of opportunity and potential insights for economists and other researchers. Focusing on the oldest domestic cricket competition, the English County Championship, we discuss issues of demand, home advantage, competitive balance and the importance of winning the pre-match coin toss to determine the playing order. Despite crick...

In less than a decade, the Egyptian Premier League has experienced three distinct changes between periods of competition in either crowded or empty stadiums. We exploit this unique sequence of natural experiments, to answer two questions neglected by the still emerging literature on the effects of crowds on behaviour and decision-making. First, doe...

Using the assignment of referees to European international association football matches played between 2002 and 2016, we ask whether judgements were biased according to the legacy of the Cold War. We find that referees from post-communist states favoured teams from non-communist states, but there was no evidence of favouritism in the other directio...

We use a series of historical natural experiments in association football to test whether social pressure from a home stadium crowd affected behaviour and outcomes. The standout effect of an empty stadium was that referees cautioned visiting players less often, by over a third of a yellow card per match or once for every twenty-two fouls committed....

In this note, we consider early evidence regarding behavioural responses to an emerging public health emergency. We explore patterns in stadium attendance demand by exploiting match-level data from the Belarusian Premier League (BPL), a football competition that kept playing unrestricted in front of spectators throughout the global COVID-19 pandemi...

We revisit the magnitude of home advantage at the Summer and Winter Olympic Games, looking back all the way to Athens in 1896. By comparing a host country’s success with their performances in previous and subsequent games, we find that home advantage has declined over time as participation and the diversity of competition have increased. Hosts of t...

This study looks at stadium attendances in elite-level European football, to suggest how people responded to the initial COVID-19 outbreak. This offers insight into how professional sports will emerge from social lockdowns and competition taking place behind closed doors. The analysis focuses on the top leagues of England, Italy, France, Spain and...

This study analyses point forecasts of exact scoreline outcomes for football matches in the English Premier League. These forecasts were made for distinct competitions and originally judged differently. We compare these with implied probability forecasts using bookmaker odds and a crowd of tipsters, as well as point and probability forecasts genera...

Bookmakers sell claims to bettors that depend on the outcomes of professional sports events. Like other financial assets, the wisdom of crowds could help sellers to price these claims more efficiently. We use the Wikipedia profile page views of professional tennis players involved in over ten thousand singles matches to construct a buzz factor. Thi...

The economics of sport and how sport provides insights into economics have experienced exogenous shocks from COVID-19, facilitating many natural experiments. These have provided partial answers to questions of: how airborne viruses may spread in crowds; how crowds respond to the risk and information about infection; how the absence of crowds may af...

We study the determinants of superstar wage effects, asking whether productivity or popularity‐based explanations are more appropriate. We use longitudinal wage and performance data for workers (players) and firms (teams) from a particular market for sports talent: Major League Soccer (MLS) in the United States. We find evidence that the top earner...

This paper studies 150 individuals who each chose to forecast the outcome of 380 fixed events, namely all football matches during the 2017/18 season of the English Premier League. The focus is on whether revisions to these forecasts before the matches began improved the likelihood of predicting correct scorelines and results. Against what theory mi...

Using over four decades of British micro data, this article looks at how the narrowing gender employment gap stalled in the early 1990s. Changes to the structure of employment between and within industry sectors impacted the gap at approximately constant rates throughout the period and do not account for the stall. Instead, changes to how women's l...

Intuition and sports knowledge suggest that the most talented professional footballers play for the best teams, i.e., positive assortative matching based on productivity. We consider Major League Soccer between 2007 and 2017. We estimate a wage equation, finding that player and team fixed wage premiums are negatively correlated. This is a puzzle, e...

Studies of financial market informational efficiency have proven burdensome in practice, because it is difficult to pinpoint when news breaks and is known by some or all the participants. We overcome this by designing a framework to detect mispricing, test informational efficiency and evaluate the behavioural biases within high-frequency prediction...

The Covid-19 pandemic has induced worldwide natural experiments on the effects of crowds. We exploit one of these experiments that took place over several countries in almost identical settings: professional football matches played behind closed doors within the 2019/20 league seasons. We find large and statistically significant effects on the numb...

The European football industry has suffered an unprecedented shock from COVID-19. In this chapter, we reflect on how the sport’s administrators responded to the initial outbreaks and what lessons can be learned. We also look ahead to what football in the post COVID-19 era could look like. We conclude that this largely depends on the decisions now f...

In this note, we consider early evidence regarding behavioural responses to an emerging public health emergency. We explore patterns in stadium attendance demand by exploiting match-level data from the Belarusian Premier League (BPL), a football competition that kept playing unrestricted in front of spectators throughout the global COVID-19 pandemi...

We contribute to the discussion on betting market efficiency by studying the odds (or prices) set by fifty-one online bookmakers, for the result outcomes in over 16,000 association football matches in England since 2010. Adapting a methodology typically used to evaluate forecast efficiency, we test the Efficient Market Hypothesis in this context. W...

We use a series of natural experiments in association football (soccer) to test whether the lack of social pressure from spectators affected behaviour and outcomes. We observe that the normal advantage to the home team from playing in their own stadium was on average eroded when they played behind closed doors, with no supporters. Among the various...

We use representative payroll data from Great Britain to document novel facts about nominal wage adjustments, focusing on workers who stayed in the same firm and job from one year to the next. The richness of these data allows us to analyse basic pay and the other components of earnings, such as overtime and incentive pay, while accounting for hour...

Cricket offers a wealth of opportunity and potential insights for economists and other researchers. Focusing on the oldest domestic cricket competition, the English County Championship, we discuss issues of demand, home advantage, competitive balance and the importance of winning the pre-match coin toss to determine the playing order. Despite crick...

This study uses data from elite-level European football matches and panel data methods to suggest how people responded to the initial COVID-19 outbreak. In Italy, England and Germany, stadium attendances were negatively affected by the previous day's newly confirmed domestic cases or deaths. In France and Spain, there was no significant attendance...

We study the determinants of superstar wage effects, asking whether productivity or popularity-based explanations are more appropriate. We use longitudinal wage and performance data for workers (players) and firms (teams) from a particular market for sports talent: Major League Soccer (MLS) in the United States. We find evidence that the top earner...

Using betting odds from two recent seasons of English Premier League football matches, we evaluate probability and point forecasts generated from a standard statistical model of goal scoring. The bookmaker odds show significant evidence of the favourite-longshot bias for exact scorelines, which is not generally present for match results. We find ev...

Using betting odds from two recent seasons of English Premier League football matches, we evaluate probability and point forecasts generated from a standard statistical model of goal scoring. The bookmaker odds show significant evidence of the favourite-longshot bias for exact scorelines, which is not generally present for match results. We find ev...

Using a linked employer–employee dataset covering large firms, we present new evidence on British wage inequality trends over the past two decades. Differences between firms in the average wages they paid did not drive these trends. Between 1996 and 2005, greater wage variance within firms accounted for 86% of the total increase in wage variance am...

Using UK employer-employee panel data, we present novel facts on how wages and working hours respond to the business cycle within jobs. Firms reacted to the Great Recession with substantial real wage cuts and by recruiting more part-time workers. A one percentage point increase in the unemployment rate led to an average decline in real hourly wages...

Intuition and sports knowledge suggest that the most talented professional footballers play for the best teams, i.e., positive assortative matching based on productivity. We consider Major League Soccer between 2007 and 2017. We estimate a wage equation, finding that player and team fixed wage premiums are negatively correlated. This is a puzzle, e...

Online Appendix to "Recent changes in British wage inequality: Evidence from large firms and occupations" -- published at Scottish Journal of Political Economy; https://doi.org/10.1111/sjpe.12225

We contribute to the discussion on betting market efficiency by studying the odds (or prices) set by fifty-one online bookmakers, for the result outcomes in over 16,000 association football matches in England since 2010. Adapting a methodology typically used to evaluate forecast efficiency, we test the Efficient Market Hypothesis in this context. W...

This study analyses point forecasts of exact scoreline outcomes for football matches in the English Premier League. These forecasts were made for distinct competitions and originally judged differently. We compare these with implied probability forecasts using bookmaker odds and a crowd of tipsters, as well as point and probability forecasts genera...

If fiscal policy exerts pressure on public services, then attention often falls on the public–private sector wage differential. Estimated with longitudinal employer–employee data for the years 2002–2016 in the United Kingdom, among men there was no significant public sector wage premium. However, women received an average 4% premium compared with w...

This data contains the judgement forecasts of 150 individuals who chose to play an online football score prediction game for all 380 matches in the 2017/18 season of the English Premier League (EPL), unquestionably the most watched domestic sports league in the world. The forecasts were of exact score outcomes, for example Manchester United to draw...

Dataset for replication of main results in "Do high wage footballers play for high wage teams?" All data obtained from public sources, namely Major League Soccer (LLC) and the Major League Soccer Player's Association.

This study reports novel facts about the UK gender pay gap. We use a representative, longitudinal and linked employer-employee dataset for 2002-16. Men's average log hourly wage was 22 points higher than women's in this period. We find 16% of this raw pay gap is accounted for by estimated firm-specific wage effects. This is almost three times the a...

This article assesses the role of segregation in explaining gender employment gaps through the United Kingdom’s Great Recession and its subsequent period of recovery and fiscal austerity. The analysis reaffirms that gender employment gaps in the UK respond to the business cycle, and it evaluates to what extent these short-term changes in the employ...

If fiscal policy exerts pressure on public services, then attention often falls on the public-private sector wage differential. Estimated with longitudinal employer-employee data for the years 2002-16 in the United Kingdom, among men there was no significant public sector wage premium. However, women received an average 4% premium compared with wor...

We study individuals who each chose to predict the outcome of fixed events in an online competition, namely all football matches during the 2017/18 season of the English Premier League. We ask whether any forecast revisions the individuals chose to make (or not), before the matches began, improved their likelihood of predicting correct scorelines a...

We apply well-known results of the econometric learning literature to the Mortensen and Pissarides real business cycle model. Agents can always learn the unique rational expectations equilibrium (REE), for all possible well-defined sets of parameter values, by using the minimum-state-variable solution to the model and decreasing gain learning. From...