Did Economists Correctly Predict Who Would Win In Beijing?

Did Economists Correctly Predict Who Would Win In Beijing?

Before the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, I wrote about economic models that aimed to pre-empt thousands of hours of television coverage, sappy features, and tape-delayed tension. John Hawksworth of PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Andrew Bernard of Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business both aimed to predict national medal hauls based on factors like home-field advantage, the size and growth of national economies, and past political affiliations. (You can check out the PriceWaterhouseCoopers projection here and the 2008 Bernard projection here.)

So how did the economists do in the individual projection event? Both performed something like the American track-and-field team--several high-profile triumphs and a couple of splashy pratfalls.

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