What Can We Learn About Economics from Sport during COVID-19?

Abstract

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 affect social pressure and arbitration decisions; and how quickly betting markets respond to new information. We review this evidence and advise how sports economics research could continue to be most valuable to policymakers.

Stadium Attendance Demand Research: A Scoping Review

“…Third, to further increase study design conformity, we excluded all 24 studies that were not modeling matchday demand. 6 As such, after the exclusion of a total of 182 manuscripts, our temporary data set contained 76 studies modeling stadium attendance demand on the primary market as proxied by behavioral intentions to attend a particular match; that is, by analyzing stated rather than revealed preferences (e.g., Singleton et al, 2021).…”

Measuring the Economic Impact of COVID-19 on the UK’s Leisure and Sport during the 2020 Lockdown

“…and related industries depending on the sport (e.g., hotels, restaurants), have been severely affected by this pandemic. As a consequence, some authors have argued that there could be an enduring shift in the sport sector, radically transforming some sport activity patterns [7,10]. At the same time, these changes could offer new opportunities for some sport entities (i.e., online sport and health food, online training and fitness events, and e-sports, etc.).…”

“…In other words, the pandemic could have a long-term sustainable effect on the sport sector. This requires specific analysis at the country level of the sports sector and industry, but empirical studies to date have only considered the distributional effects of this pandemic on some professional leagues [10,11], mainly on football [4,12,13]. Finally, there is evidence of a drastic worldwide reduction in physical activity (PA) rates during the pandemic [14], increasing socio-economic differences in sport participation [15], modifying the type of PA and sports performed [16] as well as poorer physical and mental health associated with changes in physical and sedentary behaviour [17].…”

Umpire Home Bias in Major League Baseball

“… 4. More recently, the variations in home attendance due to the Covid-19 epidemic have been used as a natural experiment for estimating the degree of referee home bias (Bryson et al, 2021; Cueva, 2020; Guerette et al, 2021; Reade et al, 2021). Also see Singleton et al (2021) for a literature review on the impact of Covid in professional sports.…”