My Research

I am an applied econometrician, with a range of research both published and in progress in many seemingly diverse areas of economics.

Work in Progress

• "Separating the crowds: Examining home and away attendances at football matches", with Brad Humphreys, Dominik Schreyer and Carl Singleton, Department of Economics, University of Reading Economics Discussion Papers. Written in honour of Stefan Kesenne.

• "Betting on a buzz, mispricing and inefficiency in online sportsbooks", with Philip Ramirez and Carl Singleton.

• "The Methodology of Red, a Football Forecasting Model from the University of Reading", setting out in detail the Red football scoreline prediction model, which was successful in the World Cup 2022 Sophisticated Forecast Competition, as organised by Daniele Paserman of Boston University.

• "Mass Outdoor Events and the Spread of an Airborne Virus: English Football and Covid-19" with Matthew Olczak and Matthew Yeo. Online appendix. Data. R Code. In Covid Economics.

• "Reviewing the Video Assistant Referee", work with Rob Simmons and Giuseppe Migali.

• "Outcomes with asymmetric payoffs: The case of the Soviet Football League".

• "The Iron Curtain and Referee Bias in International Football", work with Dmitry Dagaev, Sofia Paklina, and Carl Singleton.

• "gets: General-to- Specific (GETS) Modelling and Indicator Saturation Methods", R Package, with Genaro Sucarrat and Felix Pretis.

• "Daily Demand: Leicestershire Cricket in the post-war era", working paper.

Recent Output

• "What cannot be cured must be endured: The long-lasting effect of a COVID-19 infection on workplace productivity", with Kai Fischer and W. Benedikt Schmal, Labour Economics 79, 102281

• "Economics Lessons from sports during the COVID-19 Pandemic", with Alex Bryson, Peter Dolton, Dominik Schreyer and Carl Singleton, in "Research Handbook on Sport and COVID-19", edited by Paul Pedersen, Edward Elgar.

• "Home advantage and mispricing in indoor sports’ ghost games: the case of European basketball" with Luca De Angelis, in Annals of Operations Research, 1-28

• "Does certainty on the winner diminish the interest in sport competitions? The case of Formula One" with Pedro Garcia-del-Barrio, Empirical Economics 63 (2), 1059-1079

• "Eliminating supportive crowds reduces referee bias" with Dominik Schreyer and Carl Singleton, Economic Inquiry 60 (3), 1416-1436

• "Measuring US regional economic uncertainty", with Wei-Fong Pan and Shixuan Wang, Journal of Regional Science

• "Forecasting: theory and practice", with Fotios Petropoulos, and many co-authors, International Journal of Forecasting.

• "Competitive balance measures and the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis in European football" with Vasileios Manasis and Ioannis Ntzoufras, IMA Journal of Management Mathematics 33 (1), pp. 19-52, 2022

• "A decade of violence and empty stadiums in Egypt: When does emotion from the terraces affect behaviour on the pitch?" with Carl Singleton and D Schreyer, 2021

• "Stadium attendance demand during the COVID-19 crisis: early empirical evidence from Belarus" with Dominik Schreyer and Carl Singleton, Applied Economics Letters 28 (18), 1542-1547

• "How Sensitive are Sports Fans to Unemployment?", with Jan van Ours, Applied Economics Letters.

• "Echoes: what happens when football is played behind closed doors?", with Carl Singleton and Dominik Schreyer, Applied Economics Letters.

• "Demand for Public Events in the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Case Study of European Football", with Carl Singleton, European Sport Management Quarterly.

• "Causal Effects of an Absent Crowd on Performances and Refereeing Decisions During Covid-19", with Alex Bryson, Peter Dolton, Dominik Schreyer and Carl Singleton, Economics Letters, 2020.

• "Going with your Gut: The (In)accuracy of Forecast Revisions in a Football Score Prediction Game", with Carl Singleton and Alasdair Brown, in the Journal of Behavioural and Experimental Economics. Also a George Washington University Research Program on Forecasting Discussion Paper (No. 6).

  • Press coverage: Washington Post, and Daily Mail.

• "Information, Prices and Efficiency in An Online Betting Market", with Guy Elaad and Carl Singleton. Published in Finance Research Letters.

• "Evaluating Strange Forecasts", with Carl Singleton and Alasdair Brown, forthcoming in Scottish Journal of Political Economy, a University of Reading Department of Economics Discussion Paper, No. 2019-18.

• "Forecasting and Forecast Narratives: The Bank of England Inflation Reports", with Mike Clements, University of Reading Discussion Paper and forthcoming in International Journal of Forecasting.

• "Football Attendance over the Centuries", in A Modern Guide to Sports Economics, edited by Ruud Koning and Stefan Kesenne, 21-43, 2021, Edward Elgar (Reading Discussion Paper version here).

• "A highly disaggregated look at competitive balance", in Outcome Uncertainty in Sporting Events (editors: Placido Rodriguez, Stefan Kesenne, Brad Humphreys), pp. 75-93, 2020, Edward Elgar.

• "Officials and Home Advantage", in The SAGE Handbook of Sports Economics (editors: Bernd Frick, Brad R. Humphreys, Brian P. Soebbing, Jane E. Ruseski, Paul Downward, Tim Pawlowski), p. 219, SAGE Publishing, 2019.

• "The wisdom of amateur crowds: Evidence from an online community of sports tipsters", with Alasdair Brown, European Journal of Operations Research.

• "When are prediction market prices most informative?", with Alasdair Brown and Leighton Vaughan Williams, International Journal of Forecasting.

• "Polls to probabilities: Comparing prediction markets and opinion polls", with Leighton Vaughan Williams, International Journal of Forecasting.

• Pretis, F., Reade, J.J. and Sucarrat, G. (2017) “General-to-Specific (GETS) Modelling and Indicator Saturation with the R Package gets (version 0.7).”, Journal of Statistical Software.

• Brown, A., Rambaccussing, D., Reade, J.J. and Rossi, G. (2017), "Using Social Media to Identify Market Inefficiencies: Evidence from Twitter and Betfair", Economic Inquiry.

For Less Recent Output see my Ideas or Google Scholar pages.

I've also written some articles on Vox, The Conversation, and the Economics Observatory.