Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2411.12509

During and after COVID-19: What happened to the home advantage in Germany's first football division?

Thorsten Schank·Vivien Voigt·Christian Orthey
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

It is well-established that the home advantage (HA), the phenomenon that on average the local team performs better than the visiting team, exists in many sports. In response to the COVID-19 outbreak, spectators were banned from football stadiums, which we leverage as a natural experiment to examine the impact of stadium spectators on HA. Using data from the first division of the German Bundesliga for seasons 2016/17 to 2023/24, we are the first to focus on a longer time horizon and consider not only the first but all three seasons subject to spectator regulations as well as two subsequent seasons without. We confirm previous studies regarding the disappearance of the HA in the last nine matches of season 2019/20. This drop materialised almost entirely through a reduction of home goals. The HA in season 2020/21 (with spectator ban during most matches) was very close to the pre-COVID-19 season 2018/19, indicating that teams became accustomed to the absence of spectators. For season 2021/22, with varying spectator regulations, we detect a U-shaped relationship between HA and the stadium utilisation rate, where HA increases considerably for matches with medium stadium utilisation which is associated with a larger difference in running distance between the home and away teams.

Explore related subjects

econ.GNphysics.soc-phq-fin.EC

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Thorsten Schank, Vivien Voigt, Christian Orthey. 2024-11-19. During and after COVID-19: What happened to the home advantage in Germany's first football division?. https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.12509

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Local Media and the Shaping of Social Norms: Evidence from the Ebola outbreak

Media's influence on norms and behavior is widely recognized. Less is known about the role played by media being local. I examine this in a high-stakes context, the Ebola outbreak in Guinea. I exploit quasi-random variation in access to radio and the timing of a public-health campaign aired on community radio. I find that 12-17% of Ebola cases could have been prevented if places with access to a neighboring community radio station had instead had their own. Impacts are driven by radio being local rather than by ethno-linguistic belonging. Local media facilitates coordination in behaviors observed and sanctioned locally.

econ.GN↗
arXiv2026

Productivity Shocks and Input Misallocation: A Decomposition

This paper asks how much input misallocation productivity uncertainty generates and at which stage of input decisions it arises. I separate revenue productivity by when each component is revealed and trace each into the gap between an input's marginal revenue product and its price. In six European countries, shocks revealed after an input is committed account for 20 percent of capital gap dispersion and 5 percent of labor gap dispersion. An unanticipated one percent rise in productivity raises the capital gap by 0.92 percent and the labor gap by 0.19 percent, because most of the shock passes into the wage.

econ.GN↗
arXiv2026

When Do Type-Specific Wages Buffer Distributional Incidence in TANK?

When do relative wages buffer the unequal incidence of aggregate shocks? I derive a consumption-gap decomposition and a present-value condition for partial offset in a TANK model. An extension separates wage-setting demand elasticity from substitution between labor segments and allows each segment to contain both financial types. With a zero inherited wage gap and a same-sign discounted wedge, substitution above one gives offsetting earnings reallocation; substitution below one gives amplification. The channel disappears when financial types have identical segment exposure. Numerical experiments assess these mechanisms, shock persistence, policy feedback, and aggregate-IRF matching. In the nested perfect-alignment monetary benchmark, the peak consumption gap is about two-fifths smaller under type-specific wages than under the common-wage closure. These are conditional model comparisons, not empirical effect estimates or welfare rankings.

econ.GN↗