Jan C. van Ours’s research while affiliated with Centre for Economic Policy Research - CEPR- and other places

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Publications (468)


Average seasonal Elo ratings (strengths) since 1975 for English football’s top 5 leagues (left hand side), and the probability that a fifth division side would beat a team from the four higher divisions at home or away (right hand side).
Average seasonal attendances (log scale) since 1975 for English football’s top 5 leagues.
Expected points per match. (a) Home and away. (b) Home minus away.
Win probabilities and seasonal attendances; 1979/80–1989/90.
Impact on matchday attendances of change in rules. (a) After standard three-point rule in 1981. (b) After rule introduced in 1983. (c) After rule withdrawn in 1986.
Consumer Perceptions Matter: A Case Study of an Anomaly in English Football
  • Article
  • Full-text available

July 2024

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17 Reads

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1 Citation

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Jan C. van Ours

In 1983 England’s fifth-tier football competition introduced a two-points-for-a-home-win and three-points-for-an-away-win reward system. This system was abolished after three seasons. The anomalous point system may have been introduced to reduce home advantage but the reasons are not fully clear and neither are the reasons for abolishing the system shortly after its introduction. We find that the new point system did not affect match outcomes but it did influence match attendance negatively. We speculate that the alternative point system was perceived as unfair to potential buyers of seasonal tickets or individual match tickets some of whom as a response decided to avoid watching the game in person. Consumer perceptions seem to matter.

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Nontransitive Patterns in Long-Term Football Rivalries

July 2024

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4 Reads

Journal of Sports Economics

The phenomenon of nontransitivity in outcomes, typically observed in noneffort games with predetermined probabilities and immediate clarity, extends to team-based, time-consuming games requiring effort that unfold over a long period of time. This study explores this aspect through an empirical analysis of professional football matches in the Netherlands involving three prominent teams: Feyenoord, Ajax, and PSV. Contrary to conventional expectations, the results reveal a nontransitive pattern over more than three decades, indicating that Feyenoord is more likely to triumph over PSV, PSV over Ajax, and Ajax over Feyenoord than the reverse scenarios.




Long-term returns to local health-care spending

The European Journal of Health Economics

This paper investigates the effects of health-care spending on mortality rates of patients who experienced a heart attack. We relate in-hospital deaths to in-hospital spending and post-discharge deaths to post-discharge health-care spending. In our analysis, we use detailed administrative data on individual personal characteristics including comorbidities, information about the type of medical treatment and information about health-care expenses at the regional level. To account for potential selectivity in the region of health-care treatment we compare local patients with visitors and stayers with recent movers from a different region. We find that in regions with higher health-care spending mortality after heart attacks is substantially lower. From this we conclude that there are long-term returns to local health-care spending.







Citations (62)


... Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) introduced a new rating system based on this method in June 2018.Research in sports economics increasingly uses data on Elo ratings(Leitner, Zeileis, and Hornik 2010;Lasek et al. 2016;Cea et al. 2020;Reade and van Ours 2024). ...

Reference:

Talent Allocation in European Football Leagues: Why Competitive Imbalance May be optimal?
Consumer Perceptions Matter: A Case Study of an Anomaly in English Football

... In this paper, we study the effect of the size of crowd on home advantage in Chinese Super League (CSL), the highest-level Chinese men's football league. Home advantage is a well-established phenomenon in professional sports in general and in football in particular (e.g., (Goller and Krumer, 2020, Moskowitz and Wertheim, 2011, Picazo-Tadeo et al., 2017, van Ours and van Tuijl, 2024). 2 Moreover, a paper by Liu et al. (Liu et al., 2019) showed that the home teams in Chinese Super League win 45 percent of games, whereas away teams win only 27 percent. ...

Incentives matter sometimes: On the differences between league and Cup football matches
  • Citing Article
  • July 2024

Sports Economics Review

... Fesselmeyer (2021) documents that the performance of umpires in professional baseball decreases when the temperature reaches 95°F or more, meaning that they make more mistakes when calling balls and strikes as their accuracy of judgments decreases. Burke et al. (2023) and Picchio & Van Ours (2024) use data from professional tennis and find an age-and skill-specific decrease in performance as the ambient temperature increases. Compared to this branch of literature, a major advantage of our underlying setting is that we do not use performance measures to approximate productivity but focus on a group of penalties working as indicators of mental errors due to poor concentration. ...

The impact of high temperatures on performance in work-related activities
  • Citing Article
  • April 2024

Labour Economics

... The evidence exploiting the pandemic on judgment bias is mixed: while most studies found a reduction in judgement bias by officials toward home teams, Benz and Lopez (2023) and Bryson et al. (2021) observe that the differences in match outcome home advantage with and without crowds varied substantially across competitions, leagues, and countries. Notably, a few studies have also shown that it appears to have been the complete absence of crowds that affected outcomes, with no or smaller effects of restricted crowds, and no clear and consistent patterns of effects according to the size of the regular attendance at the events (e.g., Benz and Lopez, 2023;Bryson et al., 2021;Ehrlich and Potter, 2023;van Ours, 2024). Accordingly, based on this evidence and the corollary predictions of the theoretical model in the previous section, we state our first testable hypothesis on the effects of closed-door competition (due to the pandemic) on home advantage: HYPOTHESIS 1. ...

They didn’t know what they got till the crowd was gone
  • Citing Article
  • February 2024

Economics Letters

... In addition, some research has focused on how early-life experiences affect social interactions and management behaviours. The emotional obstacles from unfortunate childhood experiences permanently reduce feelings of trust in adulthood [74] and may result in more homelessness [75]. ...

Do early episodes of depression and anxiety make homelessness more likely?
  • Citing Article
  • October 2022

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization

... The group of interviewees was small because we needed to question AI experts, and the experience with AI in the overall society was limited at the time of the interviews. The expert's knowledge might give a bias that would not be present by talking to people from the street [30]. ...

Bias in expert product reviews
  • Citing Article
  • October 2022

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization

... Finally, Coupe at al. (2018) and Rubenson and Dawes (2022) both found in-group effects in award-voting in football. Principe and van Ours (2022) broke away from the traditional research on in-group bias in sports, by focusing on how expert journalists evaluated sports performances for which there are no objective success criteria. Analyzing 409 football players in Italian Serie A, they assessed the potential racial bias in expert journalists' player ratings. ...

Racial bias in newspaper ratings of professional football players
  • Citing Article
  • December 2021

European Economic Review

... Finally, moderator analyses will provide information about the robustness of the findings, by testing whether rank-order stability differs across sample and methodological characteristics. It is important to note that some potentially relevant moderators could not be examined in this meta-analysis, such as personality variables, socioeconomic status, and sexual orientation (Chen & van Ours, 2018;Conger et al., 2010;Karney & Bradbury, 1995). The reason is that (a) information on the characteristics was not reported in most primary studies (i.e., personality variables), (b) the information that was available was not comparable across most primary studies (i.e., socioeconomic status), or (c) the very low number of samples that provided information on the characteristic would not have allowed for reliable conclusions (i.e., sexual orientation). ...

Subjective Well-Being and Partnership Dynamics: Are Same-Sex Relationships Different?
  • Citing Article
  • January 2017

SSRN Electronic Journal

... The legalization of same-sex marriage has been found additionally to improve mental wellbeing among sexual minorities resulting in reduced suicide attempts (Tuller 2017). A recent study in the Netherlands found that same-sex marriage legalization reduced depression and anxiety disorders of sexual minorities, decreasing the mental health disparity between sexual minority and heteronormal groups (Chen and van Ours 2022). Additionally, same-sex marriage recognition increased marriage rates in the US and the probability of reporting healthcare insurance coverage among gay couples , indicating the positive spillover effects of providing equal rights to individuals, regardless of their sexual orientation. ...

Mental health effects of same‐sex marriage legalization

Health Economics

... In Figure 2 we plot seasonal average attendance data for English football's top 5 leagues. The data show that across all the English football leagues, the mid-1980s were the low point in demand for football attendance, most likely as a result of poor economic circumstances in England (Reade and Van Ours 2023). After the 1986/87 season, relegated clubs from the EFL begin to enter the dataset with much greater attendances than the clubs that previously existed in the APL. ...

How sensitive are sports fans to unemployment?