Predicting the Medal Count

Economists love to make predictions about the Summer Olympics, but the Winter Games generally attract less attention. One economist, however, does have some predictions for this year’s Games. Daniel Johnson analyzes country population, income per capita, climate, political structure, and host-nation advantage to generate medal count predictions — his “model demonstrated 94% accuracy between predicted and actual national medal counts” for the last five Olympics. At this year’s games, Johnson expects Canada to win the medal game with 27 medals, and the United States to tie Norway for second. Johnson’s model also predicts that the Nordic countries will make big gains over previous years, while Germany and China will slip in the medal count. (HT: Josh Levin and Kiril Rusev.) [%comments]