Witness to History: From Vienna to Shanghai: A Memoir of Escape, Survival and Resilience

On the rainy afternoon of November 28,1938, a slight 18-year-old Austrian man took in his first impressions of Shanghai. Paul Hoffmann had left his family and all that was familiar to him in Vienna and was now among a forlorn stream of thousands of Jewish refugees into China to escape Nazism. For the next thirteen years, Shanghai would be his home, and he made the most of the last years of the foreign-dominated world of old Shanghai. Witness to History is the moving memoir of a man caught up in the tides of history, who witnessed and experienced the Nazi revolution in Europe, the Japanese invasion of China and the Communist victory in China in 1949, and emerged from the challenges all the wiser. In Shanghai, he taught mathematics, lived the high life, and worked for an American lawyer, Norwood Altman, who was also secretly the US spy chief in China before and after the Communist takeover.

The data that professional sport generates, which is almost unparalleled in any other industry, provides a wealth of information for the economist to analyse. Sport offers economists the opportunity to study the behaviour, choices and outcomes of the decisions of players, referees, regulators and governments.

Advances in Sports Economics is a collection of newly commissioned essays that examine a wide range of different sports, including baseball, basketball, cricket, football, horse racing, rugby, tennis and Gaelic games. The contributors consider economic issues such as incentives, rule changes, labour markets, competition structure, gambling, gender equality, match official behaviour, superstar players, funding and sports infrastructure as well as interogating the methods and theories used in sports economics.

The essays showcase how the application of economic analysis can provide us with a better understanding of the mechanics of professional sport.