An investigation of home advantage and other factors affecting outcomes in English one-day cricket matches

We examined the factors affecting the outcome of cricket matches played in the English one-day county cricket league. In particular, we focused on the home-field effect and the importance of winning the pre-match toss of a coin to determine a team's strategic decision to bat first or second. A home-field effect appeared to be confirmed in that home teams won 57% of all matches with a win/loss result. A logistical regression model was used, with the outcome variable defined in terms of a home team win/loss. We found that while winning the toss is an important aspect of a one-day cricket match, other factors tend to dominate in determining the result, especially team quality and match importance for the home and away teams in the overall league context. Our results also indicate, not surprisingly given the nature of cricket attendance and spectating, that the crowd effect is largely insignificant. The results of our study do not support any rule changes requiring the abandonment of the coin toss to determine batting orderPeer reviewe

Disaggregate and aggregate inventory to sales ratios over time: the case of German corporations 1993–2005

Although inventory reduction has been a major topic in production and operations management research for many years, there is a lack of empirically confirmed answers for questions such as: Have inventories in fully industrialized economies such as Germany decreased, overall, during the past decades? To the extent, inventory reductions were successfully realized, in which industries did they occur? Are there differences in inventory reduction achievements between raw materials, work-in-process, or finished goods? Are there measurable effects of inventory reductions upon the financial performance? To the best of our knowledge, this empirical study is the first one to investigate long-term inventory development on a firm as well as on industry level in a major European economy. It is based on data from German corporations and provides answers to the research questions stated above. The study’s findings indicate that total inventory to sales ratio decreased in a statistically significant extent in four out of six industry sectors during the time frame investigated. Further results suggest that the overall impact of inventory reductions to the financial performance of companies is only of a small degree

A bound testing analysis of Wagner's law in Nigeria: 1970-2006

This study tests Wagner's law (the tendency for government activities to expand along with economic expansion) for Nigeria using annual time series data between 1970 and 2006. It adopts the bounds test approach proposed by Pesaran et�al. (2001) based on unrestricted error correction model (UECM) and Toda and Yamamoto's (1995) Granger noncausality tests. Empirical results from the bounds test indicate that there exists no long-run relationship between government expenditure and output in Nigeria. In addition, Toda and Yamamoto's (1995) causality test results show that Wagner's law does not hold for more than the period being tested. Rather we found a weak empirical support in the proposition by Keynes that public expenditure is an exogenous factor and a policy instrument for increasing national income.

Endogenous intangible resources and their place in the institutional hierarchy

© 2015, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. This paper seeks to find evidence for the impact of local culture on the share of intangible investments and the results for productivity per worker in the EU15 countries at the NUTS2 level during the period 2000–2008. The main scope of the paper is to explore the nature and consequences of intangible resources and their hierarchical relationship with culture, thus seeking to identify the genuine endogenous sources of local productivity beyond the standard Romer-type of models. In our study we use basic economic and social indicators from two main sources: the EUROSTAT Regional Database and the European Social Survey (ESS). Regression analysis, based on a pooled cross-section and on a balanced panel through a generalized method of moments (GMM) approach, shows evidence in support of: (i) the classical Tiebout hypothesis on cultural dependence of local public goods in the case of three different types of intangible investments: education, health care, and research and development; (ii) the impact of intangible investments on local productivity which confirms their treatment as investments rather than their usual treatment as a spending category in the national accounts. Clearly, the data set used has its limitations, but what remains most noticeable is the added value of the methodologically alternative measures of local culture employed in our analysis, i.e. a novel cultural attitudes Herfindahl Index, a cultural attitudes Segregation Index, and a CBD (Culture-Based Development) two-vector approach (living culture and cultural heritage). The results generated depict a confirmative picture of the hierarchical relationship between intangible investments, culture and productivity at the regional scale in Europe