Disciplinary sanctions in English Premiership Football: Is there a racial dimension?

This paper assesses the evidence for a racial difference in both the dispensation of formal disciplinary sanctions and in the number of fouls called by referees in professional football. The study uses a unique dataset comprising player match-level information drawn from five recent seasons of the English Premiership. These data were merged with data from other sources to identify, among other things, the racial affiliation of the player across four separate categories (viz., white, black, mixed race, and Asian). No systematic evidence of an unfair treatment of players from the non-white minority groups in respect of either the receipt of disciplinary cards or in the number of penalised fouls called by referees was detected.     

Spatial Statistics and Real Estate

Real estate has historically employed statistical tools designed for independent observations while simultaneously noting the violation of these assumptions in the form of clustering of same sign residuals by neighborhood, along roads, and near facilities such as airports. Spatial statistics takes these dependencies into account to provide more realistic inference (OLS has biased standard errors), better prediction, and more efficient parameter estimation. This article provides an overview of the field and directs readers to the relevant literature and software.     

Change by Design

Over the course of a century of professional practice, designers have mastered a set of skills that can be productively applied to a wider range of problems than has commonly been supposed. These include complex social problems, issues of organizational management, and strategic innovation. Conversely, non‐designers—those in leadership positions in companies, governmental and non‐governmental organizations, professionals in a broad range of services and industries—can benefit from learning how to think like designers. We offer some large‐scale and more finely grained ideas about how this might happen.     

EU Enlargement and the Portuguese Economy

The main focus of the present paper is on the emerging and likely future trade effects of enlargement. Though our particular concern is with Portugal, we set the scene by comparing the trade structures of the 10 countries of Central and Eastern Europe (i.e. the eight CEE accession states plus Bulgaria and Romania) – including an analysis of the individual cases of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland – with those of the EU15 as a whole, and with those of the 4 EU cohesion countries. The elimination of trade barriers between incumbents and accession states will have two trade‐related effects on EU incumbents: an increase in bilateral flows with the CEEC and a shift effect as the CEEC displace some incumbent exports to EU markets. The first effect is likely to be strongest for those incumbents for which there is a strong overlap between their export structure and the import structure of the CEEC. Portugal emerges as one of the economies with the least overlap. The displacement effect, we conclude, is likely to be particularly strong in the case of Portugal, given the high degree of similarity between Portuguese exports and those of the CEEC. Portugal appears to be ‘being squeezed from below’ in that, for the majority of its traditional export sectors, the CEEC became progressively more competitive during the second half of the 1990's. Portuguese specialisation was increasingly confined to low‐technology, low‐added‐value sectors with declining demand, as strong FDI inflows to the CEEC led to an increasing preponderance of more dynamic sectors in their export structures. Thus, Portugal is also being squeezed from above. This suggests that there may be substantial industrial disruption, in response to which labour‐market flexibility and dynamic entrepreneurial response is crucial. Intersectoral mobility is generally easier the more highly educated the workforce – an indicator on which Portugal scores poorly. The Portuguese labour market, however, displays a high degree of flexibility, consistent with its long lasting low rate of unemployment. Continued flexibility will help minimise these likely adjustment costs. Besides the trade and industry effects, other topics considered in the paper include the implications of enlargement for Portugal's ability to attract FDI, the likely consequences for Portugal of inward migration from the CEEC to the EU, and the implications of enlargement for Portugal's budgetary relations with the rest of the EU.