Craig A. Depken

• Doctor of Philosophy
• University of North Carolina at Charlotte

During the fall 2020 and spring 2021, many college football games in the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) and the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) were postponed or cancelled because of protocols instituted during the COVID-19 pandemic. These games are considered “phantom games” because they were scheduled and announced in advance but were no...

In this note, we comment on a recent paper in the journal that proposes a new normalization procedure when converting tennis betting odds to the implied probabilities of each player winning. The new procedure is especially germane for matches in which there is a heavy favorite and where there is concern that traditional conversion methods understat...

This paper describes the outcome of an artefactual field experiment of group discrimination using sports fans. The behavior of individuals whose identity is deeply tied to a larger group or popular institution is politically important, particularly when it comes to crafting public policy. Sports fans provide a unique opportunity to study individual...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of how various local political, cultural, and sporting events affect daily room rentals in the Austin, Texas hotel market. In an innovation of previous studies that use daily hotel data, we differentiate how events affect different tiers of hotel rooms ranging from economy hotels to luxury hotels. The resul...

We provide a theoretical and empirical analysis of strategic momentum and psychological momentum in best-of-three contests between players with unequal skills. As a theoretical benchmark, we develop a fully rational model of best-of-three contests and define psychological momentum as systematic deviation from the theoretical equilibrium. An empiric...

We provide a theoretical and empirical analysis of set-level strategic and psychological momentums in a sample of 8,193 ATP best-of-five-set tennis matches where players have asymmetric abilities. Theoretical predictions match observed Set 1 outcomes, the only set with no set-level psychological momentum, but do not match any other sets. We find ev...

While human capital and foreign capital have received considerable attention in the study of economic growth, foreign remittances are less of a focus. Though some studies have identified the increasing importance of remittances, they have failed to analyze the relationship between foreign remittances and economic growth. The aim of this paper is to...

This paper investigates the relationship between European football league competitive balance and the performance of that league’s participants in UEFA competitions. The evidence suggests that competitive balance measured using performance points fits the performance coefficients of countries participating in the Champions League and Europa League...

We address an apparent paradox that the market shares of four ENERGY STAR appliances in the United States do not respond to within-state changes in electricity prices. We resolve the paradox by showing that market shares do respond to between-state variation in electricity prices. We also suggest an economic explanation for the paradox through the...

Sports leagues have requested state legislatures to pass so-called integrity fees or taxes on the entire amount bet on their games, ostensibly to provide resources to protect against game fixing and other corrupt behavior. These fees might just augment league revenues. Integrity fees have different consequences if they are placed on a sports book’s...

This article studies the transfer market for international football players. Analyzing a sample of 5,760 player transfers over 14 years, we provide evidence that clubs in English football pay larger transfer fee premiums compared to clubs in the top leagues of France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. While the popular press often mentions the English pre...

This paper analyzes the extent to which the filming of the popular television show Game of Thrones affected tourism in the Croatian city of Dubrovnik. Using monthly data and applying difference-in-differences, the study shows that the impact of airing Game of Thrones episodes filmed in Dubrovnik corresponded to approximately 5000 additional tourism...

This paper examines the implications for potential victims of crime through religious self- identification. If a criminal can choose between an unidentified victim and a religiously self-identified individual, all else equal whom does he choose to victimize? We use religious self-identification to indicate that a person is a believer of Pascal’s Wa...

This case study investigates how various sporting and cultural events impact economic activity at a single full-service restaurant in center-city Charlotte, NC. We find no evidence of significant changes in daily revenue, customers served, and revenue per customer on the day before, day of, and day after many of the events. The exceptions are Natio...

Community and specialized enforcement are recognized as important components of deterring antisocial behavior. To provide insights on the interplay between deterrence methods, we examine the empirical evolution of fighting and scoring in the National Hockey League using time series data. We identify structural changes that correlate with changes in...

This paper investigates the impact of baseball’s reserve clause as it evolved from a “gentleman’s agreement” to a formal contract stipulation. Using data describing the salaries of 34 Major League Baseball players during the 1880s, we test whether average salaries, remuneration to marginal product, and the premium paid to a player for changing team...

We utilize two waves of the National Income Dynamics Study in South Africa to estimate the returns to education in 2010 and 2012. We find that during this time period the returns to education were approximately 18% per year of education and that the returns were higher for females relative to males and higher for those living in urban relative to r...

Within-family career following is common in many occupations, including law, politics, business, agriculture, medicine, entertainment, and professional sports. For children who enter the same career as their parents there are several potential benefits: physical-capital transfer, human-capital transfer, brand-name-loyalty transfer, or nepotism. In...

This paper proposes using market-based information to investigate the likelihood of widespread point shaving in college basketball games with strong favorites. Information embodied in pre-game money lines facilitates the calculation of the market's expectation that the game will end with a strong favorite winning but not covering the point spread,...

Using a large dataset of matches played between two publicly traded English football (soccer) clubs, we test for and confirm an asymmetric market reaction to winning and losing and that the stock market respond stronger and slower to bad news (losing) than good news (winning). In contrast to previous studies, we show that financial fundamentals hel...

This paper uses daily hotel occupancy data to examine the effects of a wide variety of political and sporting events on the hotel room market of Charlotte, North Carolina from 2005 to 2014. Two political conventions and NASCAR auto races are associated with large increases in hotel occupancy, prices, and revenue, but many other events have no disce...

Understanding the patterns and dynamics of spatial origin-destination flow data has been a long-standing goal of spatial scientists. This study aims at developing a new flow clustering method called flowHDBSCAN, which has the potential to be applied to various urban dynamics issues such as spatial movement analysis and intelligent transportation sy...

Using a panel of National Hockey League players from 2000 through 2013, we analyse the determinants of career length in the league. In our analysis, we include both performance variables and nationality of origin to determine their importance in determining career length. We find that European-born players have shorter careers than North American-b...

We contribute to the literature on money line betting markets by investigating the relationships between the various methods used to derive subjective win probabilities from money lines. We show that, although the seven methods described appear to be unique, they actually share many common assumptions and that, surprisingly, they reduce to three di...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of salary disparity and team performance in the National Hockey League during the first decade of the twenty-first century. We find that the 2005 Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) reduced average salaries immediately after it was introduced but did not change the trajectory of average salaries nor did i...

This paper investigates the empirical relationship between corruption, economic growth, and government spending in fourteen transitioning economies from 1995-2013. We find strong evidence of bilateral Granger causation between economic growth and corruption for the full sample but weaker evidence of such a relationship for four former Yugoslav repu...

Using monthly data for three proxies of copper theft, this article uses multivariate regression models to examine the relationship between copper prices and copper theft in the United States from 2006 through mid-2013. The findings indicate that copper thefts, as proxied by insurance claims for copper theft, newspaper articles in LexisNexis mention...

This paper investigates how geography and transportation costs influence the decisions by shippers of which port of export to use. Using a large sample of disaggregated shipments originating from several countries in Europe, we show that European logistics networks exhibit a low level of international integration that affects shipping route choice....

This article examines shipments of wine from European producers to 16 European ports. The research question focuses on disaggregated decisions about which port to use controlling for distance, port fixed effects and whether a national border must be crossed to reach the port. Using a conditional logit model we find heterogeneous impacts of transpor...

This paper provides empirical evidence that the favorite-longshot bias persists in money-line betting markets of both college basketball and college football. This is the first clear evidence of the favorite-longshot bias existing in fixed-odds money-line betting markets in the US, as the reverse favorite-longshot bias has been documented in profes...

We examine how water contamination risk from an inactive hazardous waste site is capitalized into surrounding vacant land prices. After public knowledge of the first instance of off-site contamination, we find that shallow groundwater contamination potential is negatively capitalized into land prices, as is proximity to a known contaminated well. P...

Conventional wisdom in sports is that consistency is praiseworthy and that competitors should seek momentum. A small standard deviation is the simplest measure of consistency, and a positive autocorrelation is the simplest measure of momentum. With these statistical definitions, we find that consistency is predictable for Sprint Cup drivers, but mo...

In this paper, we test whether accuracy in the wagering markets for NCAA Division I men's basketball improves when there are more betting lines available for a given game. The empirical evidence indicates that when the money line is offered, it has no impact on the accuracy of the sides line as it is a redundant security, but the offering of the to...

We examine the impact of distressed sales on single-family house prices during a housing market collapse. The innovation here is a methodology to create a proxy for distressed sales when such sales are not identified in the data but are commonplace in the market. We apply our methodology to publicly available data from Las Vegas, Nevada. We find th...

We contribute to the literature on money line betting markets by investigating the relationships between the various methods used to derive subjective win probabilities from money lines. We show that, although the seven methods described appear to be unique, they actually share many common assumptions and that, surprisingly, they reduce to three di...

In a mountainous terrain surface water contamination relates to stream flow and topography, while shallow and deep groundwater contamination flow depends on fissures in bedrock which can only be detected and predicted using a variety of complex methods. Using data from western North Carolina, we examine how the risk of offsite water contamination f...

The purpose of this research is to estimate the potential effect of carbon pricing on the purchase of energy efficient appliances, using refrigerators as a representative appliance. Carbon emissions are widely believed to be contributing to climate change, although the U.S. has not yet introduced a nationwide method of limiting these emissions (two...

This paper contributes to the literature focusing on the impact of foreclosure status on single family house prices during a housing market collapse when foreclosures and distressed sales become the majority of recorded transactions. While it is generally possible to identify Real-estate owned (REO) transactions in publicly available data, other fo...

When corporate sponsors want to maximize their exposure, they often focus sponsorship dollars on events, teams, and athletes that will prove to be reliable, respectable, and, most important, repetitive advertising outlets. Analyzing the factors that increase a broadcaster’s propensity to display a sponsor during television broadcasts is often hard...

This book is the first volume of the two-volume The Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Sports, which includes chapters by authors in the quickly growing field of sports economics. The two volumes recognize two ways that economics and sports interact. First, economic analysis has helped everyone understand many of the peculiar institutions in sport...

Emotions can have important effects on performance and economic outcomes. This study examines the behavior of professional athletes involved in a dynamic competition in their own natural environment. We empirically analyze overtime shootouts in the National Hockey League in the context of performance under psychological pressure as initially outlin...

We propose a methodology that facilitates a direct test of the homevoter hypothesis, which posits that homeowners vote in favor of public projects they perceive increase residential property values and against those that do not. First, we estimate how pre-referendum events that signal a higher probability that the public project will be undertaken...

A key issue in the almost ubiquitous global housing boom of the past two decades has been the role and importance of speculation and the existence of bubble effects driving house prices to unsustainable levels. This chapter focuses on this issue and illustrates the nature of speculative investment and local market dynamics in an extreme case study...

This chapter investigates spatial crime patterns associated with events taking place in two downtown venues in Charlotte, NC: an open-air football stadium and an enclosed multipurpose arena. The evidence suggests neither venue’s events contribute to an overall increase in reported total, property, or violent crimes in the city. However, both venues...

The authors thank various classes at the University of Massachusetts, the University of Texas-Arlington, seminar participants at the College of Charleston, and an anonymous referee for feedback and comments on earlier versions of this material. Robert Houston is also acknowledged for his assistance and helpful comments. Any remaining errors are the...

Milfoil is an aggressive aquatic invasive species that affects freshwater lakes by altering lake ecosystems and degrading the quality of water recreation activities. Three studies estimating the effect of milfoil infestation on lakefront property values have each found substantial discounts. However, whether based on past or current methods of trea...

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the structure of land prices both before and after land conservation occurs. Using data describing 12 years of vacant land transactions in Buncombe County, North Carolina, we find that fee simple conservations, as opposed to conservation easements, occur in higher-priced areas, but that lower-valued parc...

This paper employs an ordered probit version of the gravity equation to estimate the effects of economic freedom on U.S. consumer exports and imports for 131 countries over the years 2000 – 2005. Using the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of the World Index, we find that increased economic freedom in the rest of the world would increase the Unit...

Using data from the 2007, 2008, and 2009 National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) seasons, this article shows that the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis pertains to both race attendance and television audience, with the former only responding to season-level uncertainty and the latter responding to both race-level and season-level un...

Purpose This paper aims to examine the anatomy of a real estate bubble. In the process, the paper identifies three phases of the market's evolution: flips, flops and foreclosures. An examination of the Las Vegas real estate market illustrates the three phases. Design/methodology/approach The paper examines transaction data from the metropolitan La...

The empirical analysis of multiproduct pricing suffers from a lack of clear theoretical guidance and appropriate data, limitations which often render traditional regression-based analyses impractical. This paper analyzes ticket, parking, and concession pricing in Major League Baseball for the period 1991-2003 using a new methodology based on princi...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of attendance to Division I women’s collegiate basketball programs from 2000-2009. The evidence suggests that women’s basketball attendance is sensitive to many of the same variables known to influence attendance to men’s collegiate basketball, including current and recent team quality, recent post-season s...

Positive economics predicts that Sub-S banks, with no taxes paid at the corporate level, will price their products lower than otherwise identical C corporation banks in a competitive environment. Alternatively, if banks price bundle their products, Sub-S tax benefits might have little (no) effect on product rates. The empirical analysis finds that...

Using monthly data describing 23 cities in Texas from January, 1990, through December, 2008, the net impacts of various professional and collegiate sporting events on sales tax revenues are estimated. Contrary to the rhetoric offered by those who argue in favor of public subsidies to host professional sports franchises and mega-events, the authors...

North Carolina law requires local governments to adopt zoning ordinances and land use restrictions for watersheds that feed water supplies. Watershed protection ordinances often contain minimum lot size restrictions that constrain development density in the watershed. This article examines vacant land prices in the Buncombe County, NC, Ivy River wa...

This paper investigates the final bid prices for players during the first three seasons of the Indian Premier League (IPL). Although the IPL imposes a salary cap and other labor-market restrictions, it is anticipated that final bid prices reflect the aggregate value of player productivity statistics, potential leadership skills, and auction charact...

Using data describing Division I men’s basketball from 1990-2009, this paper presents empirical evidence that participating in the NCAA tournament or the National Invitational Tournament (NIT) generates internal benefits in the form of increased future attendance to a team’s home games. These impacts are in addition to those generated by team winni...

Using data from the 2007, 2008, and 2009 NASCAR seasons, this paper shows that the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis pertains to both race attendance and television audience, with the former only responding to race-level uncertainty and the latter responding to both race-level and season-level uncertainty. Of the other contributing influences, the...

We analyze auctions from eBay to determine whether seller reputation, auction timing, and auction aesthetics influence closing prices. Using a sample of auctions concerning the Apple iPhone, we find that closing prices are not strongly influenced by the level of seller reputation but prices are considerably lower when sellers have no reputation at...

We examine conservation activity in western North Carolina, where state income tax credits from land conservation have been available since 1983. Six land trusts, including the Nature Conservancy, undertake conservations in both fee simple and in conservation easement over a twelve year period. We find that value of conserved land differs by conser...

This paper analyzes the net impacts of college football games on the sales tax revenues and taxable sales of four mid-sized cities in Texas. The paper addresses the question in the title, but also asks whether state policy-makers might be justified in encouraging schools in their state to play one another based on the local economic impact those ga...

By increasing the ability to discover, access, and use academic journal articles, the Internet has become the dominant mode by which scholars stay abreast of the scholarly literature. This new technology is hypothesized to have impacted the referencing pattern as well as the research productivity of scholars. These hypotheses are tested in the area...

Beginning with a time-dependent definition of a house flip, the analysis examines flipping activity in Las Vegas from 1994 through mid-2007. We find that flip homes tend to be older and smaller than non-flip homes. Moreover, as the residential property market in Las Vegas begins to take off, flip homes become a more significant percentage of total...

This study uses California data to compare redevelopment for properties subject to mandatory and voluntary cleanup. CalSites are subject to the CERCLA liability approach, while properties in the Voluntary Cleanup Program (VCP) are subject to a risk-based approach (RBA) that allows some contamination to remain for non-residential redevelopment. The...

The State of North Carolina's Water Supply Watershed Protection Act of 1989 required local governments to adopt land use measures in watersheds to protect the water supply emanating from the watersheds. We examine vacant land prices in the Ivy River watershed of Buncombe County, NC, at the time such regulation took effect. Our results suggest that...

ABSTRACT Byincreasing the ability to discover, access, and use academic journal articles, the Internet has become,the dominant,mode,by which,scholars stay abreast of the scholarly literature. This new

This paper explores the impact of multi-car teams on driver wins, total points, and total earnings in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series for the years of 2005 through 2008. Early in NASCAR’s history, multi-car teams were rare as the conventional wisdom was that multi-car teams would have poor chemistry which would negatively impact driver performance. Re...

This paper empirically investigates whether schools with an intercollegiate football team experience greater attendance at women’s basketball games. The empirical question is important because if football increases attendance and hence revenue to other sports then these benefits should be included when considering the net benefits of football. Usin...

We develop a simple model in which firm-specific advertising has cooperative and predatory effects. Our model is set in a static market where firms are naturally segmented into two distinct submarkets: several large firms located in the core, with small firms operating as a fringe. We test the net effect of opposing market size (cooperative) and ma...

The blogosphere is a relatively recent development on the Internet and, for this reason, has received limited empirical investigation. This short note investigates whether the popularity of the 500 most popular blogs during August and September of 2005, as measured by in-coming links, followed the first-digit distribution attributed to Benford (193...

We measure the effect of governance on sovereign creditworthiness, as measured by sovereign credit ratings. Governance may affect the government's ability to raise tax revenue to service its debt, with poor enough governance leading to insolvency. Data for 1996-2005 indicate that countries with better governance have higher probabilities of getting...

Internet message boards are inherently a world of cheap talk due to the anonymity of message authors. This paper investigates whether a pecuniary reputation system influences the adverse selection problem endemic to message boards. First, we find evidence that authors with high reputation scores are less likely to voluntarily offer a buy-hold-sell...

Using a panel of international student test scores 1980 – 2000 (PISA and TIMSS), panel fixed effects estimates suggest that government spending decentralization is conducive to student performance. The effect does not appear to be mediated through levels of educational spending.

We empirically investigate whether there is any statistically and economically meaningful correlation between the success a nation’s soccer team in the FIFA World Cup Finals and that nation’s real per-capita GDP growth. Using an unbalanced panel of countries from 1950 through 2004, we find that, for certain continents, there are non-trivial correla...

This paper investigates whether disparity in team member quality impacts team production using NCAA 4x400m relay teams. The net peer effects are estimated to have both an absolute and relative negative effect on the team performance. Because NCAA relay teams are comprised of unpaid amateurs, we utilize a direct measure of team-member quality rather...

The State of North Carolina's Water Supply Watershed Protection Act of 1989 required local governments to adopt land use measures in watersheds to protect the water supply emanating from the watersheds. Watershed protection ordinances often contain minimum lot size restrictions that constrain development density in the watershed. We examine vacant...

This paper investigates the introduction of the reserve clause in Major League Baseball during the 1880s. Taking advantage of a unique data set describing the salaries for twenty nine high-quality players throughout the decade of the 1880s, we investigate the impact of the reserve clause as it evolved from a "gentleman's agreement" to a formal cont...

"We investigate the impact of a potential new sports venue on residential property values, focusing on the National Football League's Dallas Cowboys' search for a new host city in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. We find that residential property values in the city of Dallas increased following the announcement of a possible new stadium in the city. At...

This paper investigates the impact of anti-scalping laws on the face value of tickets in professional football and baseball. Previous theoretical models have suggested that scalpers might cause an increase in prices at the ticket window because they represent an increase in demand. This paper provides a model in which ticket scalping has an ambiguo...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the relationships between three popular lottery games in the state of Texas: Lotto Texas, Texas Two Step, and the multi-state Mega Millions game. The analysis suggests complementarity between the Lotto Texas and Mega Millions; habitual players tend to play relatively safer games; the 2006 Lotto Texas rul...

This paper extends the analysis of [Hanssen, A., Andersen, T., 1999. Has discrimination lessened over time? A test using baseball's All-star vote. Economic Inquiry 37, 326–352] using All-star votes from 1990 through 2000 to investigate customer-based discrimination in Major League Baseball (MLB). The previous findings of no evidence of customer-bas...