Measuring Parity in Sports Leagues with Draws: Further Comments

This paper re-examines the calculation of the relative standard deviation (RSD) measure of competitive balance in leagues in which draws are possible outcomes. Some key conclusions emerging from the exchange between Cain and Haddock (2006) and Fort (2007) are reversed. There is no difference, for any given points assignment scheme, between the RSD for absolute points compared to percentages of points. However, variations in the points assignment that change the ratio of points for a win compared to a draw do result in different RSD values, although the numerical differences are minor.sports economics, competitive balance, relative standard deviation,idealized standard deviation, draws/ties

Playoff Uncertainty, Match Uncertainty and Attendance at Australian National Rugby League Matches

This paper develops a new simulation-based measure of playoff uncertainty and investigates its contribution to modelling match attendance compared to other variants of playoff uncertainty in the existing literature. A model of match attendance that incorporates match uncertainty, playoff uncertainty, past home-team performance and other relevant control variables is fitted to Australian National Rugby League data for seasons 2004-2008 using fixed effects estimation. The results suggest that playoff uncertainty and home-team success are more important determinants of match attendance than match uncertainty. Alternative measures of playoff uncertainty based on points behind the leader, although more ad hoc, also appear able to capture the effects of playoff uncertainty.playoff uncertainty, match uncertainty, sports league attendance, Australian National Rugby League, fixed effects estimation

Productivity, Factor Accumulation and Social Networks: Theory and Evidence

The paper analyzes how social barriers to communication affect economy-wide productivity and factor accumulation. Using a dynamic model of an economy that includes a reproducible capital stock (physical or human) and effective labor, a negative relationship is shown to exist between social barriers to communication and total factor productivity (TFP), per capita consumption and reproducible capital. Robust estimates obtained from cross-country data are consistent with the model’s predictions. The theory and empirical results help explain cross-country differences in TFP, the high productivity performance of leading industrialized countries and how productivity ‘catch up’ may be initiated.productivity, dynamic model, barriers to communication

Productivity, Factor Accumulation and Social Networks: Theory and Evidence

The paper analyses how barriers to communication across social groups affect economy-wide productivity and factor accumulation. Using a dynamic model of an economy that includes a reproducible capital stock (physical or human) and effective labour, social barriers to communication are shown to have a negative effect on total factor productivity (TFP), per capita consumption and the accumulation of reproducible capital. Propositions from the model are tested using cross-country data from over a 100 countries. The results obtained from OLS and instrumental variables estimation, and with an exhaustive set of robustness tests, support the hypothesis that social barriers to communication, as measured by linguistic diversity, reduce TFP. Some evidence is also found to support the idea that the effects of social barriers to communication may be mitigated by improvements in mass communications. In addition, changes in the stocks of human and physical capital are found to be negatively related to social barriers to communication, after controlling for the initial levels of income and human or physical capital. The theory and empirical results together help explain the persistence of cross-country differences in TFP and provide insights as to how economies may initiate productivity 'catch up'.productivity, social networks, economic growth

Education spending, economic development, and the size of government

We examine the association between economic development and two measures of public spending on education: the “national effort” (public spending on education as a proportion of GDP) and “budget share” (public spending on education as a proportion of total government spending). Using panel data for a large sample of countries from 1989 to 2015, we compare mean levels of national effort and budget share measures for economically and politically distinct groups of countries. We find that economically more developed (richer) countries are characterised by a higher national effort and a lower budget share than less economically developed countries. This implies that richer countries, on average, have larger public sectors than poorer countries, consistent with Wagner’s law and Baumol’s “cost disease” hypothesis

Productivity, factor accumulation and social networks: theory and evidence

The paper analyzes how social barriers to communication affect economy-wide productivity and factor accumulation. Using a dynamic model of an economy that includes a reproducible capital stock (physical or human) and effective labor, a negative relationship is shown to exist between social barriers to communication and total factor productivity (TFP), per capita consumption and reproducible capital. Robust estimates obtained from cross-country data are consistent with the models predictions. The theory and empirical results help explain cross-country differences in TFP, the high productivity performance of leading industrialized countries and how productivity catch up may be initiated

Evaluating ingenious instruments for fundamental determinants of long-run economic growth and development*

The empirical literature on the determinants of cross-country differences in long-run development is characterized by the ingenious nature of many of the instruments used. However, scepticism remains about their ability to provide a valid basis for causal inference. This paper examines the extent to which explicit consideration of the statistical adequacy of the underlying reduced form (RF), which provides an embedding framework for the structural equations, can usefully complement economic theory as a basis for assessing instrument choice in the fundamental determinants literature. Diagnostic testing of RFs in influential studies reveals evidence of model misspecification, with parameter non-constancy and spatial dependence of the residuals almost ubiquitous. This feature, surprisingly not previously identified, potentially undermines inferences about the structural parameters, such as the quantitative and statistical significance of different fundamental determinants

Education spending and Wagner’s law: New international evidence

This paper examines the association between economic development and two measures of public spending on education, namely the ‘national effort’ (total spending as a percentage of GDP) and ‘budget share’ (total spending as a percentage of total government spending). Using data for a large sample of countries from 1989 to 2015, we illustrate a novel application of Wagner’s law. We compare mean levels of national effort and budget share measures for economically and politically distinct groups of countries. We find that the signs of the associations between the level of economic development and the two education spending measures differ. This implies that richer countries have larger public sectors than do poorer countries, consistent with Wagner’s Law. The findings are summarized in the form of three inequality propositions about the national effort, budget share and size of government for richer versus poorer countries. In addition, for comparable levels of economic development, democratic countries tend to spend more on education than is the case for their non-democratic counterparts

The Review of Economic Performance and Social Progress 2002: Towards a Social Understanding of Productivity

In this chapter, Quentin Grafton, Stephen Knowles and Dorian Owen examine the implications for productivity arising from the level of social diversity along a variety of dimensions, including ethnic, linguistic and religious differences and inequalities between rich and poor. Their basic intuition is that human beings tend to associate and communicate most readily with people similar to themselves, and their hypothesis is therefore that "social divergence" generates social barriers to communication among groups, inhibiting the diffusion of knowledge and lowering the level of productivity in the economy. As a consequence, the more diverse the society and the greater the number of distinct social groups, the higher are the communication costs and the greater are the barriers to the exchange of ideas and innovation.Social Divergence, Social Values, Social Capital, Total Factor Productivity, Multifactor Productivity, Multi-factor Productivity, Fractionalization, Homogeneity, Heterogeneity, Productivity, Labour Productivity, Labor Productivity, Growth, Inequality, Educational Inequality, Networks, Trust, Social Networks, Language, Education, Religion, Social Cohesion, Cohesion

Barro's fertility equations: the robustness of the role of female education and income

Barro and Lee (1994) and Barro and Sala-i-Martin (1995) find that real per-capita GDP and both male and female education have important effects on fertility in their cross-country empirical studies. In order to assess the robustness of their results, their estimated models are subjected to specification and diagnostic testing, the effects on the model of using the improved Barro and Lee (1996) cross-country data on educational attainment of the population aged 15 and over are examined, and the different specifications used by Barro and Lee and by Barro and Sala-i-Martin compared. The results obtained suggest that their fertility equations do not perform well in terms of diagnostic testing, and are very sensitive to the use of different vintages of the educational attainment proxies and of the Summers-Heston cross-country income data. A robust explanation of fertility, to link with empirical growth equations, has, therefore, not yet been found; further work is required in this area