A cricket ground or a football stadium? The business of ground sharing at the Adelaide Oval before 1973

Before 1973, cricket and Australian Football used the Adelaide Oval for major games during their respective seasons. Football’s popularity as a spectator sport prompted its organising body to seek to build an improved stadium, but cricket authorities controlled the asset and acted to maintain its specialised character as a cricket ground. A case study of how the gains from a shared capital good are negotiated when asset controllers and users have different objectives is provided. A series of counterfactual scenarios based on football remaining at the Oval is constructed from archival sources and their outcomes projected based on data in financial reports.     

Intertemporal price discrimination in infinite horizon

In infinite horizon, a credible durable-good monopolist may resort to intertemporal price discrimination. We provide an analytical characterization of his optimal price policy when consumers and the monopolist have different values for the trade because of distinct discount factors.     

Impacts of Immigration on an Ageing Welfare State: An Applied General Equilibrium Model for France

Immigration is often seen as an instrument of adaptation for ageing countries. In this paper, we evaluate, using a dynamic general equilibrium model, the contribution of migration policy in reducing the tax burden associated with the ageing population in France. Four alternative scenarios, compared with a baseline scenario based on official projections, are simulated with the aim of quantifying the effects of immigration on French social protection finances. We show that the age and, to a lesser extent, the skill structure of immigrants are the key features that mainly determine the effects on social protection finances. Overall, these effects are all the more positive in the short to medium term if the migration policy is selective (in favour of more skilled workers). In the long term, the beneficial effects of a selective policy may disappear. But whatever the degree of selectivity of the migration policy, the financial gains from higher consequent migration flows are relatively moderate compared with the demographic changes implied by ageing.     

Stadium financing,usage and the impact of institutional change on consumer demand: The case of VFL Park, 1970–1986

Ownership, financing, and usage of stadiums are key issues that affect the commercial operations of sports leagues. Stadiums that are owned by leagues may generate deadweight losses if they are not used to full capacity. We (1) model demand to measure the impact of the Victorian Football League building a privately-funded stadium (VFL Park); (2) then use counterfactual scenarios to estimate social saving from different venues and playing days, and determine whether further welfare gains would have been possible. VFL Park provided greater control over revenue, but further institutional change was needed to fully exploit potential commercial gains from the stadium.     

Sport and Queensland Aboriginal reserves in the 1920s and 1930s: Ideology,revenue, and exploitation

Rugby league flourished in the Aboriginal settlements run by the Queensland government in the 1920s and 1930s, as officials relaxed policies of segregation and isolation to allow Aboriginal teams to travel within the state. Revenue from the games, at times significant sums, went to government trust accounts and not directly to the settlements. Available data on this sporting income and government spending policies reveals an exploitative system, ethically comparable to Stolen Wages and reflecting the dispossession of Aboriginal Queenslanders in this era. While sport bolstered community pride, these exploitative dimensions qualify its contribution to Aboriginal wellbeing.     

Distant but Close in Sight: Firm-level Evidence on French–German Productivity Gaps in Manufacturing

We study productivity-level distributions of manufacturing firms in France and Germany, and how these distributions evolved across the Great Recession. We show the presence of a systematic productivity advantage of German firms over French ones in the decade 2003–2013, but the gap has narrowed down after the Great Recession. Convergence is explained by the better growth performance of French firms in the post-recession period, especially of those located in the top percentiles of the productivity distribution. We also highlight the role of sectoral growth, firm size, and export intensity in explaining the above convergence. In contrast, the contribution of allocative efficiency was small.     

Learning to hesitate

Experimental Economics - We investigate how people make choices when they are unsure about the value of the options they face and have to decide whether to choose now or wait and acquire more...