Publication
The Korean Economic Review
Predicting the Medal Wins at the 2006 Winter Olympics: an Econometrics Approach
WADE D. PFAUYear 2006Vol. 22No. 2
Abstract
Demographic and economic characteristics have been shown to provideimportant predictive power for determining a country’s success in theOlympic Games. This paper extends such research, providing a set ofpredictions for the gold medals and total medals each country will win at the2006 Winter Olympics. We expected Germany to win the most medals,followed by the United States, Norway, Italy, Austria, and Canada. For totalmedals, the overall correlation between the predictions and the actual resultswas 0.934. While Germany and the United States did finish in the top twoplaces, there were some surprises as Canada, Austria, and Russia performedbetter than expected, while Norway and Italy did not live up to expectations.