the distance to competitive balance a cardinal measure competitive balance is a key variable in the analysis of sports competitions there are several indexes that measure competitive balance but either they are not a mathematical metric or they do no

regime changes in international real interest rates are they a monetary phenomenon in this paper we use the bai and perron 1998 2001 2003 methodology to test for multiple structural breaks in the mean real interest rate for 13 industrialized countries we find extensive evidence of structural breaks in the mean real interest rate for all 13 countries in an attempt to explain the breaks in international real interest rates we also test for multiple structural breaks in the mean inflation rate for the 13 countries once again we find extensive evidence of structural breaks in the mean inflation rate for all of the countries interestingly the breaks in inflation rates and real interest rates often coincide with increases decreases in the mean inflation rate as we move from one regime to the next typically associated with decreases increases in the mean real interest rate

competitive balance and the participation spectatorship gap in chinese table tennis abstractexcessive competitive imbalance holds the potential to render teams and by extension leagues inviable the china table tennis super league has languished in its attempt to catch on as a popular spectator sport in spite of the sport s popularity as recreational activity one of the primary reasons for the participation spectatorship gap cited by officials is competitive imbalance this research estimates a number of within season balance measures including the standard deviation of winning concentration ratio and herfindahl hirschman index the results show that both the men s and women s leagues have been relatively balanced over time implications regarding competitive balance and other league policy considerations are explored

the long run relationship between inflation and output in postwar economies abstract we investigate the relationship between inflation and real output in a large sample of postwar economies our methodology is to use a structural vector autoregression to estimate the response of the level of real output to permanent inflation shocks separately for each country we find that a permanent shock to inflation is not associated with a permanent movement in the level of real output for most countries in our sample the main exceptions are certain low inflation countries in which permanent inflation shocks permanently increase the level of output we also find that permanent inflation shocks do not permanently influence real output growth rates in our sample

the effects of monetary policy at different stages of economic development abstract the effects of monetary policy vary significantly across countries in particular recent empirical work finds evidence of a tobin effect in high income countries and a reverse tobin effect in less developed economies we present a neoclassical growth model where money is required for investment and consumption purposes in contrast to standard cash in advance models the reliance on cash is inversely related to the extent of capital formation in this setting we demonstrate that the effects of monetary policy depend on the level of development in particular inflation adversely affects capital formation at low levels of income because there is a high reliance on cash and a high cost of capital by comparison the financial system operates more efficiently in advanced countries consequently monetary policy generates a tobin effect

real effects of monetary policy in a world economy abstract we present a two country heterogeneous agent model in which changes in a country s monetary policy affect real interest rates relative prices of traded and nontraded goods and real exchange rates nontransitory real effects of monetary policy stem from legal restrictions in the form of country specific reserve requirements without violating the classical assumptions of individual rationality and flexible prices the model s implications seem qualitatively consistent with the u s experience of the 1980s a monetary policy tightening leading to a rise in the real interest rate and to an initial rise in the real value of the dollar which is subsequently reversed

on the fisher effect abstract we use post war quarterly data for belgium canada denmark france germany greece ireland japan the netherlands the united kingdom and the united states to examine the fisherian link between inflation and short term nominal interest rates in doing so we apply the king and watson 1997 methodology paying particular attention to the integration and cointegration properties of the variables since meaningful fisher effect tests critically depend on such properties we conclude that the data are generally rejecting the fisher effect

economic aspects of anti dumping policies the common sense view of dumping is that it is an unfair trading practice against which nations should legitimately be able to introduce countervailing measures no government can be expected to stand by whilst its markets are flooded by foreign imports whose prices are kept artificially low in relation to the price of the product on its own tariff protected domestic market it is this type of unfair trading advantage which anti dumping legislation is designed to combat stanbrook 1980 in line with this view article vi of the general agreement on tariffs and trade gatt permits importing countries to impose anti dumping duties in appropriate circumstances normal gatt obligations notwithstanding although it is interesting to note that the practice of dumping is not in itself contrary to any of the gatt rules as a result individual nations and trading blocks have developed extensive anti dumping laws and regulations that are broadly consistent with article vi and with the associated gatt anti dumping code which interprets the provisions of article vi and elaborates rules for their application

reputation and imperfect information abstract a common observation in the informal literature of economics and elsewhere is that is multistage games players may seek early in the game to acquire a reputation for being tough or benevolent or something else but this phenomenon is not observed in some formal game theoretic analyses of finite games such as selten s finitely repeated chain store game or in the finitely repeated prisoners dilemma we reexamine selten s model adding to it a small amount of imperfect or incomplete information about players payoffs and we find that this addition is sufficient to give rise to the reputation effect that one intuitively expects

monetary fiscal and reserve requirement policy in a simple monetary growth model the authors consider an otherwise conventional monetary growth model in which spatial separation and limited communication create a transactions role for currency and stochastic relocation gives rise to financial intermediaries in this framework they consider how changes in fiscal and monetary policy and in reserve requirements affect inflation capital formation and nominal interest rates there is also considerable scope for multiple equilibria the authors show how reserve requirements that never bind along actual equilibrium paths can play an important role in avoiding undesirable equilibria finally they demonstrate that changes in apparently nonbinding reserve requirements can have significant real effects coauthors are mark g guzman elisabeth huybens and bruce d smith copyright 1997 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

evaluating changes in league structure the reorganization of the scottish football league this article investigates the relationship between league structure and the demand for professional team sport using data from the scottish football league sfl 1971 to 1980 the sfl was restructured in 1975 and thus provides an excellent opportunity for the empirical analysis of the influence of league structure the general channels by which league structure affects demand are explored estimates are made of the impact on individual clubs by predicting what attendances would have been in the absence of the league reorganization finally the distribution of attendances across clubs is examined for evidence of the influence of league structure

optimal monetary policy and economic growth abstract a question at the center of many analyses of optimal monetary policy is why do central banks never implement the friedman rule to the list of answers to this question we add neoclassical production specifically the tobin effect as one possible explanation to that end we study an overlapping generations economy with capital where limited communication and stochastic relocation create an endogenous transactions role for fiat money we assume a production function with a knowledge externality romer style that nests economies with endogenous growth ak form and those with no long run growth the diamond model the tobin effect is shown to be always operative under crra preferences a mild degree of social increasing returns is sufficient but not necessary for some positive inflation to dominate zero inflation and for the friedman rule to be sub optimal irrespective of the degree of risk aversion

can higher inflation reduce real interest rates in the long run this paper describes a simple general equilibrium model in which a permanent easing of monetary policy engineered via open market purchases may produce a permanent decrease in the real interest rate and a permanent increase in the inflation rate under somewhat stronger assumptions the nominal interest rate may also decline est ce qu une inflation plus forte peut reduire les taux d interet reels a long terme ce m6moire pr6sente un modele d 6quilibre g6n6ral simple dans lequel un adoucissement per manent de la politique mon6taire engendr6 par des op6rations d open market peut pro duire une chute permanente du taux d int6ret r6el et un accroissement permanent du taux d inflation dans le cadre de postulats plus contraignants le taux d interet nominal peut meme chuter

tight money policies and inflation revisited in this paper we reconsider the link between tight money policies and inflation in the spirit of sargent and wallace s 1981 influential paper some unpleasant monetarist arithmetic a standard neoclassical model with capital bonds and return dominated currency is used the potential for tight money policies to be inflationary unpleasant arithmetic exists even when the real interest rate is below the growth rate of the economy additionally the likely observability of unpleasant arithmetic in real world economies is shown to depend crucially on the type of monetary policy rule that is used jel classification e52 e63 un autre coup d il sur la relation entre politiques monetaires restrictives et inflation ce memoire re examine la relation entre politiques monetaires restrictives et inflation dans l esprit du travail de sargent et wallace 1981 some unpleasant monetarist arithmetic les auteurs utilisent un modele neo classique standard avec capital debentures et une monnaie dont les rendements sont domines par ceux d autres reservoirs de valeur la possibilite que les politiques monetaires restrictives soient inflationnistes existe meme quand le taux d interet reel est plus petit que le taux de croissance de l economie de plus on montre que l obtention de ces resultats deplaisants dans les economies concretes depend fondamentalement du type de regle monetaire qu on utilise

monetary policy arithmetic reconciling theory with evidence empirical evidence indicates that in countries with low inflation rates a permanent decrease in inflation rate either has no impact on capital stock and output superneutrality or causes them to fall moderately existing budget arithmetic models of monetary policy cannot deliver superneutrality in this paper we conduct a budget arithmetic analysis of monetary policy using a money demand specification money in the utility function that is new to this literature we find that one simple assumption about utility from money delivers superneutrality while a more general assumption delivers departures from superneutrality in the direction consistent with the evidence jel classification e60 e13

tight money and inflation abstract in a recent paper sargent and wallace present an example where tightening of monetary policy over a specified time interval in conjunction with a constant deficit leads to an increase in the rate of inflation not only beyond this interval but even from the outset in the present paper i show how the latter result can be derived from a standard monetary growth model of the sidrauski brock type this enables a relatively simple interpretation of the apparent paradox

the economic design of sporting contests what is the optimal number of entrants in a race or the optimal number of teams in a baseball league what is the optimal structure of prizes for a golf tournament or degree of revenue sharing for a football championship how evenly balanced should the competing teams be in the nascar or formula one championships what is the maximum number of entrants per nation to the olympic games that should be permitted what quota of qualifying teams to the soccer world cup should be allocated to the developing nations

tight money and inflation further results abstract the sargent wallace results on inflationary effects of monetary restraint are considered in a sidrauski money growth model when the utility function is unrestricted except for separability temporary monetary tightening will eventually lead to higher inflation when the deficit is fixed only if the elasticity of money demand with respect to the money growth rate is less than unity it is also shown that for inflation to rise immediately further requires the elasticity with respect to the nominal interest rate to be no less than unity

the role of money in two alternative models when is the friedman rule optimal and why abstract in models of money with an infinitely lived representative agent ilra models the optimal monetary policy is almost always the friedman rule in overlapping generations og models by contrast the friedman rule may not be optimal in this paper we use this difference in monetary policy prescriptions to help us identify and study the key difference between these two models as models of money we study the welfare properties of monetary policy in a simple og model under two very different money demand specifications and two alternative assumptions about the generational timing of taxes for money retirement we conclude that the key difference between ilra and og monetary models is that in the latter the standard method for constructing a monetary regime causes transactions involving money to become intergenerational transfers under alternative government fiscal monetary regimes that offset these intergenerational transfers the friedman rule is always optimal

international evidence on the long run impact of inflation in this paper i use a structural vector autoregression framework to analyze the effects of a permanent change in inflation on the long run real interest rate and real output level in 14 industrialized countries long run monetary superneutrality is rejected for all 14 countries using annual data the results indicate that a permanent increase in inflation lowers the long run real interest rate in each country a permanent increase in inflation also increases the long run real output level in a number of countries long run monetary superneutrality is also rejected for four out of the five countries examined using quarterly data under long run monetary superneutrality lrsn a per

inflation and the capital stock there is a long literature examining the theoretical relationship between the rate of inflation and the size of the capital stock in an economy this literature has produced varied predictions about the effects of inflation on the capital stock in this paper we present some time series evidence on this issue we estimate a structural var model for thirty four countries and discover that for the majority of these countries there is no statistically significant long run effect of inflation on the capital stock moreover for countries where a significant effect is found the long run coefficient estimate is typically positive overall our empirical results support the view that the long run level of the capital stock is invariant to permanent changes in the inflation rate

on the decisiveness of a game in a tournament abstract in sport tournaments in which teams are matched two at a time it is useful for a variety of reasons to be able to quantify how important a particular game is the need for such quantitative information has been addressed in the literature by several more or less simple measures of game importance in this paper we point out some of the drawbacks of those measures and we propose a different approach which rather targets how decisive a game is with respect to the final victory we give a definition of this idea of game decisiveness in terms of the uncertainty about the eventual winner prevailing in the tournament at the time of the game as this uncertainty is strongly related to the notion of entropy of a probability distribution our decisiveness measure is based on entropy related concepts we study the suggested decisiveness measure on two real tournaments the 1988 nba championship series and the uefa 2012 european football championship euro 2012 and we show how well it agrees with what intuition suggests finally we also use our decisiveness measure to objectively analyse the recent uefa decision to expand the european football championship from 16 to 24 nations in the future in terms of the overall attractiveness of the competition

measuring competitive balance in sports using generalized entropy with an application to english premier league football a central issue in the economics of sport is the degree of competitive balance in sporting contests the importance attached to competitive balance is predicated on the belief that it is uncertainty about the outcomes of sporting contests that attracts spectators and sponsors in a perfectly balanced competition each team would have an equal chance of winning each match and therefore of winning the championship or the league by contrast the absence of competitive balance would mean that the results of sporting contests would become predictable and attendance at sporting contests would suffer the general theme that underpins the issue of competitive balance is that of inequality this article proposes a general measure of competitive balance based on the generalized entropy ge approach to measuring inequality and shows how this might be interpreted in terms of the league s welfare the measures are applied to results from 2006 to 2007 season of the english premier league epl

some even more unpleasant monetarist arithmetic does monetizing a deficit always result in a higher rate of inflation than bond financing the same deficit t j sargent and n wallace 1981 produced conditions under which the answer was negative unpleasant monetarist arithmetic subsequent authors have challenged the empirical validity of these conditions the authors develop a model similar to that of sargent and wallace and modify it to allow for financial intermediation in the presence of reserve requirements unpleasant arithmetic arises even when the real rate of growth exceeds the real return on bonds moreover under empirically plausible restrictions there exists a unique equilibrium no laffer curve considerations arise

perceived game uncertainty suspense and the demand for sport this study tries bridging between different behavioral economic explanations for the lack of support of the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis in spectator sports we test a measure of perceived game uncertainty that is comparable to objective measures frequently tested in the literature econometric results suggest that fans do not perceive closeness of a game differently than how economists have tended to measure it however fans perceptions of suspensefulness are distinct from their perceptions of game uncertainty moreover the finding that fans preferences for game uncertainty are dominated by loss aversion also emerges independently of fanship status in our stated preference setting jel l83 d12 z2

a performance assessment of the angolan soccer league abstractthis article analyses the technical efficiency of the angolan soccer league from 2008 to 2014 using a translog distance stochastic frontier model the greene stochastic frontier model presented in 2005 and kumbhakar stochastic frontier model presented in 1990 are adopted and the covariates used include luanda location funding by the oil company sonangol club supported by rich fans and club relegated during the period policy implications are then derived