Liam Lenten

Ormond College, University of Melbourne

The data that professional sport generates, which is almost unparalleled in any other industry, provides a wealth of information for the economist to analyse. Sport offers economists the opportunity to study the behaviour, choices and outcomes of the decisions of players, referees, regulators and governments. Advances in Sports Economics is a coll...

The data that professional sport generates, which is almost unparalleled in any other industry, provides a wealth of information for the economist to analyse. Sport offers economists the opportunity to study the behaviour, choices and outcomes of the decisions of players, referees, regulators and governments. Advances in Sports Economics is a coll...

This paper is an orthogonal study to that of Kendall and Lenten (2017)—on the perverse unintended consequences of badly designed sports rules. This paper, unlike the previous one, focuses on the positive narrative by aggregating a collection of academic work proposing rule change ideas, some of which have been implemented already. We also discuss f...

Over the last 30 years, there has been an increasing tendency for artists to collaborate with ‘feature’ artists on one-off song projects. Although there might be purely artistic reasons for such collaborations, it is not clear a priori if there are also economic returns in terms of increased demand. Furthermore, if there is evidence of increased de...

The paper reviews the literature and data on the role of finance in socioeconomic development. The evidence suggests that a well‐developed financial system can certainly enhance people's prosperity, but an excessively large and poorly regulated financial system can do more harm than good. We start by making the important distinction between traditi...

This study explores the effect of bonus incentive mechanisms with a focus on how such a scheme influences aggregate production levels of teams of workers, specifically. We identify this using data from a highly competitive setting in professional sport, which involves a unique tournament design rule in an elite European rugby competition. The model...

This paper proposes a new anti-doping policy. In a conditional pension scheme, athletes have to pay a fraction of their proceeds from sports into a fund from which they can draw only well after their careers and if they have never been caught doping. Theoretically, this fund has two important advantages over conventional anti-doping policies such a...

Given the significant, adverse health implications associated with performance-enhancing drugs in sport, anti-doping policy represents a pivotal intervention for not only protecting sport’s credibility, but also for safeguarding athletes’ health. However, current World Anti-doping Agency (WADA) policy has proven limited in controlling banned doping...

This study investigates whether relative performance evaluations of labor output are biased in the presence of sentiment, even when the (supposedly independent) evaluators are external. Data from a field-experiment setting—involving a pro-sport League's best-player award—allows for empirical testing of this proposition. After controlling for within...

This article considers an adjustment to the method of determining the order of draft picks in the Australian Football League (AFL). Rather than pure reverse order based on the end-of-season ladder (standings), an alternative draft-pick allocation (henceforth called 'ADPA') policy is proposed and evaluated. It holds that the draft-pick order rule sh...

This article introduces and then examines a novel antidoping policy mechanism, based upon a conditional superannuation fund for professional athletes. It begins by presenting a theoretical case in favor of the scheme relative to the background of current policy. Consideration is given to the utility and benefits of a conditional superannuation mech...

This study examines voting results of two distinct but related long-running music polls conducted by Australia's public-owned youth radio station, Triple J, known as the Hottest 100. We document a number of stylised patterns displayed in the data related to song survival, rank ordering, movements, entry age and exit age across the five all-time Hot...

Using data from an official most valuable player award in professional sport, we test for the presence of discrimination by match officials (umpires), who are responsible for ranking the top three players within each match. These umpires are found to award significantly more votes to (and have a higher probability of voting for) players identified...

The popularity and business impact of major sports have been growing globally over time. This paper focuses on ice hockey, specifically the National Hockey League in North America. It reports a striking irregularity in ice hockey’s scoring dynamics relative to comparable sports such as soccer and rugby, namely a scoring surge in the middle section...

Commercial practices are being re-defined by disruptive innovations that are opening up new global and local markets. This chapter examines how changing technologies are creating new opportunities for entrepreneurs in both the developing and developed world. In the developing world, micro-finance and mobile technologies are linking the vulnerable t...

Efficacy of industry policy implementation is enhanced when governments expedite resolution of private sector uncertainty. This study reinforces the mechanism through which production outcomes improve, via program evaluation analysis from professional sports. An alternative determination rule for allocating picks in reverse-order drafts—fewest game...

Like many professional sports leagues, the Australian Football League (AFL) operates an unbalanced schedule in which each team plays other teams an unequal number of times (once or twice) each season. This has led the AFL purposefully to schedule certain matches to be repeated each season with the remaining fixtures mostly randomly allocated. We ex...

Mike Wright (Wright, M. OR analysis of sporting rules – A survey. European Journal of Operational Research, 232(1):1–8, 2014) recently presented a survey of sporting rules from an Operational Research (OR) perspective. He surveyed 21 sports, which consider the rules of sports and tournaments and whether changes have led to unintended consequences....

We examine the impact of secondary incentives by evaluating agent behaviour in a professional sport that rewards multiple outcomes. Our analysis focuses on the Super Rugby competition, which awards four points for a win and bonus points for scoring four or more tries and/or losing by seven or fewer points. Using binary response models, we find that...

The presence of asymmetry in the relation between attendances and competitive balance in the Australian Football League is tested, over the period 1945-2010. The results from the well-specified structural time-series model validate the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis, and the null of no asymmetry is rejected easily in the structural innovations o...

The conference and divisional system has long been a staple part of tournament design in the major pro-sports leagues of North America. This popular but highly-rigid system determines on how many occasions all bilateral pairings of teams play each other during the season. Despite the virtues of this system, it necessitates removing the biases it ge...

Assessing the effect of the timing and sequencing of various policy regimes on optimizing agent behavior is both important and difficult. To offer some insights, this article examines a timing decision from sports. The penalty shootout in football (soccer) has long been seen as problematic, among other reasons because it creates incentives for exce...

A popular myth in football (soccer) that it is unwise tactically to score early against Brazil is busted using data from 1993 to 2010. This result provides further evidence about the choice of timing of effort exertion by an underdog in a finite-length industry contest against a more favoured opponent.

While the linkage between team performance and attendances is well established, there has been negligible previous research using club memberships as an alternative indicator of demand for sport. Little attention has been paid to how the number of memberships is affected by common measures of team performance, such as the team's win-ratio. This stu...

The past two decades have witnessed an explosion of scholarly research in the field of the economics of sports, and an increasing acceptance from the mainstream of the economics discipline. Of course, common interest in athletics is nothing new. As noted by the first paper in this symposium, spectator sports date back to at least the early Greeks a...

A range of cross-sectional models are estimated with a view to establishing the factors that determine the valuation of professional athletes in a highly-specialised sport, with an application to cricket's Indian Premier League (IPL). We distinguish between personal characteristic and playing ability factors, and with respect to the former, between...

Using a structural time-series model, the forecasting accuracy of a wide range of macroeconomic variables is investigated. Specifically of importance is whether the Henderson moving-average procedure distorts the underlying time-series properties of the data for forecasting purposes. Given the weight of attention in the literature to the seasonal a...

Bonus point systems are a popular tournament design feature in some sports. We consider a bonus point system for the Australian Football League (AFL). In this paper, we utilise league points as a measure of team strength in a prediction model and choose the allocation of points to maximise prediction accuracy. For AFL data extending over seasons 19...

In the light of the topical nature of 'bananas and petrol' being blamed for driving much of the inflationary pressures in Australia during 2006, the 'headline' and 'underlying' rates of inflation are scrutinised in terms of forecasting accuracy. A general structural time-series modelling strategy is then employed to estimate models for both types o...

A new measure for competitive balance between seasons is proposed, which takes the form of a mobility gain function, based on each team’s win ratios from the current and previous seasons. This ‘dynamic’ function measures competitive balance within a oneperiod change framework. While it is not suggested that this measure replace useful existing with...

A structural time-series model is estimated to investigate the relation between competitive balance, measured by the actual-to-idealised standard deviation ratio, and average match attendance in the Australian Football League from 1945 to 2005. The unobserved components approach allows the data to be modelled in ways new to the literature on this t...

The aim of this paper is to test whether there is empirical evidence of two Beveridge curves for male/female vacancies. This paper uses data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) labour force surveys and vacancies surveys to study the relationship between job vacancies and unemployment over the period 1983-2005. The central discoveries are...

The Australian Football League (AFL) has operated its fixture on the basis of an unbalanced schedule since the league expanded from 12 to 14 teams in 1987. This system contains a number of factors (some random) determining the set of bilateral combinations of teams that play each other on an extra occasion during the course of the season, not least...

The frequency of draws in test cricket has declined noticeably in the last fifteen years. This has been brought about by changes in the style of the 5-day game, coupled with several rule changes designed to extend time played. While many believe this to be good for the game, a contrary argument advanced here suggests that too many Tests are finishi...

Since the season ending in 2001, the Scottish Premier League (SPL) has, unlike other European football leagues, utilised an unbalanced schedule, by which the strongest teams in a given season play each other an extra time, mutatis mutandis for the weakest teams. While this approach may make sense for several reasons, it also has implications for wi...

This paper investigates the effect of seasonal adjustment on the forecasting power of structural time series models. The empirical work is based on 18 quarterly and monthly Australian time series (both macro and sectoral). Models are estimated for the seasonally unadjusted and seasonally adjusted time series, and out-of-sample forecasts are generat...

We systematically explore the time-series properties of life insurance demand using a novel statistical procedure that allows multiple unobservable (but interpretable) components to be extracted. This methodology allows the data to be modelled in new and innovative ways. We find univariate series decomposition allows us to more easily explain the b...

Using a structural time-series model attributed to Harvey (1989), the forecasting accuracy of key aggregate Australian tourism figures is investigated, namely total visitor arrivals and resident departures. Specifically of importance is whether the Henderson Moving Average procedure used by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) to generate 'tre...

In this paper, we undertake an empirical investigation into the possibility of climate change in Australian centres using average monthly air temperatures for six sites around the country over the period 1901:1–1998:12. By estimating a multivariate structural time series model and carrying out the appropriate tests, it is concluded that the tempera...

In this study, a time series analysis of the relationship over the business cycle between labour force participation and unemployment in Australia is presented using the sample period extending from 1978Q1-2000Q4, with the purpose of testing for the presence of asymmetry. Seasonal adjustment of the variables is performed using the method outlined b...

It is argued that the X-11 seasonal adjustment procedure suffers from severe drawbacks, and so it should be abandoned in favour of model-based seasonal adjustment. Furthermore, it is argued that Harvey's structural time series model is superior to the conventional seasonal ARIMA models for the purpose of model-based seasonal adjustment. It is shown...

This study presents a time series analysis of the cyclical relationship between the labour force participation rate and the unemployment rate in Australia over the period 1979-1998. The Hodrick-Prescott filter is employed to extract the cyclical components of the series, which are used for the purposes of testing. This generates estimates more robu...

The cyclical behaviour of the trade balance is examined using quarterly data for eight countries covering the period 1960:1-1995:3. Two methods are employed: the calculation of the correlation coefficient between the HP-filtered series and the estimation of a structural time series model. Both methods produce results which are supportive of the hyp...

A univariate time series analysis of the consumption of beer, wine and spirits in the UK over the period 1964-1995 is presented. The analysis shows that the consumption of beer and wine exhibits stochastic seasonality while the consumption of spirits exhibits deterministic seasonality. Moreover, the three series are found to have stochastic trends....

Since the season ending in 2001, the Scottish Premier League (SPL) has, unlike other European football leagues, utilised an unbalanced schedule, by which the strongest teams in a given season play each other an extra time, mutatis mutandis for the weakest teams. While this approach may make sense for several reasons, it also has implications for wi...