Mega-Events: Is Baylor Football to Waco What the Super Bowl is to Houston?

Abstract

Using monthly data describing 23 cities in Texas from January, 1990, through December, 2008, the net impacts of various professional and collegiate sporting events on sales tax revenues are estimated. Contrary to the rhetoric offered by those who argue in favor of public subsidies to host professional sports franchises and mega-events, the authors find that regular season and many postseason games actually correspond with net decreases in economic activity in the host city, from which we infer that a professional sports franchise generates considerable substitution effects for the local population. The authors find that college football games have a positive impact on local host-city tax revenues and that the relative impact of a season of college football might be roughly equivalent to the relative impact of the Super Bowl.

A Compensating Differential Approach to Valuing the Social Benefit of Minor League Baseball

“…As explained in Section , there are two prevailing views on the social benefit of minor league teams which both rely on the size of the city. The idea of relative effects is not new to sports research (e.g., Coates and Depken ). Similarly, Seaman (), Matheson (), and Agha and Rascher (in press) suggest that smaller cities may be more likely to experience positive economic impacts from sport events and teams.…”

A direct test of the homevoter hypothesis

“…The dramatic increase in the number of new stadiums across the four major sports in the United States has been accompanied by a large and well-established literature investigating the impacts of new stadiums on local economies. These include the impact of a new stadium on local development (Campbell, 1999;and Nelson, 2001), local employment and income levels (Baade andDye, 1990, andCoates andHumphreys, 2003), local tourism and hotel occupancy rates (Lavoie and Rodriguez, 2005), and local tax revenue (Coates, 2006, andCoates andDepken, 2007). In a different vein, several papers have investigated the impact of a new stadium on attendance (for example, Clapp and Hakes, 2005), team winning percentage (Quinn et al, 2003), and the financial status of the franchise that plays in the stadium (Depken, 2006).…”

Major Sports Events: Economic Impact

“…This list of ex-post studies on the "core" economic effects of major events on income, employment and taxation may not be complete, also because of the difficulty to define a "major event" (Coates & Depken, 2011;Maennig & Zimbalist, 2012a).…”