Dennis Coates

• PhD
• Professor at University of Maryland, Baltimore County

The purpose of this research is two-fold; first, to assess whether men and women football players “perform the same work,” as required for wage discrimination, and second, to compare pay and performance for men and women players in the top professional soccer leagues in the US. We utilize data from Major League Soccer and the National Women’s Socce...

A 1999 study by Dennis Coates and Brad R. Humphreys found the presence of major sports franchises to have no significant impact on the growth rate of per capita personal income and to be negatively correlated with the level of per capita personal income for a sample of all cities that had been home to at least one franchise in any of three professi...

This article informs public policy toward professional sports stadiums, which state and local governments routinely subsidize. Our analysis provides a history of stadium construction and funding in the U.S., documenting trends that portend a forthcoming new wave of stadiums. Despite robust evidence that stadiums are not economic development catalys...

The study tests 3 research hypotheses on the teaching‐research nexus using the administrative data of the HSE University in Russia for 7 years. We confirmed the hypothesis that a lower classroom teaching load is associated with higher research output. Undergraduate courses have a relatively higher negative effect, especially on the probability of p...

In surveys across countries, nonprofit sports clubs report their perceived financial situation using some form of Likert scale; however, it is unclear what this subjectively reported rating reflects. The purpose of this study is to examine the link between objective financial measures and club officials’ perceptions of the financial situation. The...

This research estimates the effect of specific player position on salary in Major League Soccer. We expand a mincer-style wage equation with indicators for precise roles as defined by the Football Manager™ simulation. Our salary data covers 1,174 salaries for the 2019 and 2020 seasons. We match this to 17 positions and consider generalist and speci...

Using Major League Soccer data from 2004 to 2018 seasons as a rich dataset, this study examines the role of economic and personal freedom at subnational (state) level in determining team performance. Inspired by public economics studies and issues related with labour migration, unlike previous studies, we investigate the relationship between the qu...

Local governments routinely subsidize sports stadiums and arenas using the justification that hosting professional franchises produces economic development and social benefits in the community. The prevalence of venue subsidies generated an extensive and vibrant research literature, which spans over 30 years and includes more than 130 studies. We c...

Tournament theory has been supported by many pieces of empirical research in different fields. However, tournament theory literature focuses largely on the incentives of individual competitors. In our paper we develop a model the organizer choice between team and individual tournament and suggest a model of rank-order tournaments between teams. We...

Crowd-sourcing of information has become popular in the years since James Surowiecki published The Wisdom of Crowds: why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies, and nations. In sports, crowd-sourced estimates of players’ values and abilities are common, particularly in football where salary...

Research question: Despite significantly increasing membership in professional football clubs over time, few members exercise their right to vote. We explore whether factors found to influence turnout to shareholder voting and political elections are also relevant in this peculiar setting. Given the geographically widespread distribution of members...

The role of economic freedom in national and sub-national development has been studied extensively in both cross-country and in cross-regional studies and used to explain differences in a wide array of economic outcomes. These findings motivated us to construct an index of economic freedom for the regions of the Russian Federation (EFRF). This pape...

Crowd-sourcing of information has become popular in the years since James Surowiecki published The Wisdom of Crowds: why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies, and nations. In sports, crowd-sourced estimates of players’ values and abilities are common, particularly in football where salary...

Purpose Video games are considered as a leisure activity that makes being unemployed more attractive than before. In this study, the authors use eSports prizes as a proxy for the popularity of video games to analyze its influence on total and youth unemployment. Design/methodology/approach The authors develop a theoretical model and empirically te...

This study considers the football transfer market as a network and analyzes how characteristics of a football club’s player transfer network activities influence club performance. We use data on 23,220 unique football clubs from 189 countries from 1996 through 2016. Our results show that for sport performance the best strategy is to have well-estab...

This study investigates whether the economic freedom of a region drives firm performance. Despite the large number of papers about the relationship between economic freedom and growth, there is still little evidence on the role of economic freedom in the performance of individual firms. We address this gap in the literature using hierarchical linea...

The Russian government has programs to assist Russian companies with financial and organizational support. Award of procurement contracts may also serve as assistance to companies. This paper uses data from a survey of Russian companies to draw inferences about the motivation behind the choice of recipients. Possible motivations are an intent to fo...

Using Major League Soccer as a unique dataset, this study examines the direct and indirect role of coaches' experience in determining team performance. Inspired by labor market studies, we applied traditional indicators of team salary structure and, unlike previous studies, empirically test the hypothesis that coach experience affects the way in wh...

Growing importance of human resources places the role of managers at the core of company efficiency. However, there are studies that demonstrate the efficiency of teams without a manager, so‐called self‐managed teams, is higher comparing with managed teams. Thus, despite the focus on managerial efficiency in the economic literature, the issue of wh...

We use eSports data to construct an empirical model to measure the effect of diversity on team performance. Different kinds of diversities are considered, diversity of culture, diversity of language and diversity of skill. Our main results are that cultural diversity is beneficial for team performance: the absence of diversity reduces performance b...

This study used the opportunity to conduct a survey with a contingent valuation method scenario in the weeks prior to an actual referendum on bidding for the 2024 Olympic Summer Games in Hamburg. Only 41.2% of respondents planned to vote favorably and 30.1% reported a positive willingness-to-pay. We allowed respondents to state the institution they...

Research in labor economics has examined many determinants of earnings, including whether an individual is left or right handed. Sports economists have recently shown that in the soccer labor market, being able to kick well with both the left and the right foot is rewarded with a salary premium. This paper examines pay and performance for hockey pl...

Using data from the Russian Premier League, this paper estimates brand strength of a football club as the effect that club has on attendance when it is the visiting team. This objective measure of sports club brand contrasts with the subjective, survey-based measures common in the literature. The analysis then turns to the determinants of this meas...

This study tries bridging between different behavioral economic explanations for the lack of support of the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis in spectator sports. We test a measure of perceived game uncertainty that is comparable to objective measures frequently tested in the literature. Econometric results suggest that fans do not perceive closene...

Indices of economic freedom have been created for over 150 countries and for a variety of sub-national areas. This is the first index measuring economic freedom at the sub-national level within Russia. The index looks at the 82 regions1 of the Russian Federation from the country’s independence in 1991 to its most recent developments in 2015. The in...

Indices of economic freedom have been created for over 150 countries and for a variety of sub-national areas (Arman, Samida, & Walker, 1999; Khandker, 2015; Micu, 2015; Stansel, 2013; Stansel & McMahon, 2000). This is the first index measuring economic freedom at the sub-national level within Russia. The index looks at the 82 regions of the Russian...

Time constraints are a major barrier to participation in physical activity. The purpose of this study is to examine (1) how participants in a short fitness program (two 30-minute sessions per week over a four-week period) change the time allocated to other weekly activities and (2) what factors explain the differences in time allocation. A quasi-ex...

En el presente documento se lleva a cabo un análisis comparativo del impacto económico del Rallye de Ourense en sus 42ª, 43ª y 44ª ediciones. El informe muestra la evolución de la repercusión económica que ha tenido el evento sobre la ciudad de Ourense en el periodo analizado. Además se observa la consistencia de los resultados tanto en el impacto...

Aim: This study examines the role of time in explaining the effect of physical activity on subjective well-being. Specifically, it looks at the composite structure of time needed for participation in a time-efficient fitness programme and how different time components affect satisfaction with health, leisure time, fitness, body, and look. Methods:...

In Munich, a referendum on a bid for the 2022 Winter Olympics was held in November 2013 and failed. This study analyzes the determinants of the percent of favorable votes using secondary data from all 52 communities involved in the referendum. The evidence suggests that potential host communities tended to have larger vote shares in favor of puttin...

Sport event promoters aim to organize them to get the best return on their investment. The purpose of this study is to learn better how to manage the event to maximize the benefit to the host area. Most studies on economic impact of sporting events focus on mega events or look for an impact in medium to large size cities. This study estimates the e...

The economics literature related to the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis (re)opens the discussion of whether the fans’ perceptions of competitive balance are in line with Rottenberg’s and Neale’s theory. This paper contributes to the literature by analyzing the effect of fans’ perceptions of suspensefulness on their willingness-to-pay for a single...

Objective: To examine the effect of a four-week fitness program on the participants’ satisfaction with life and health. Methods: The three-fold study design comprised a physical entry test accompanied by a pre survey, a fitness program (six strength exercises; two times 30 minutes per week over a four-week period), and an exit test accompanied by...

This research utilizes a compensating differential framework to measure the social benefits of minor league baseball teams. Consistent with findings at the major league level, individual housing observations from 138 metropolitan areas between 1993 and 2005 show that affiliated teams are associated with a significant 6 to 8% increase in rents in mi...

This study estimates the relationship between production and salary structure in Major League Soccer (MLS), the highest level of professional soccer (association football) in North America. Soccer production, measured as league points per game, is modeled as a function of a team’s total wage bill, the distribution of the team’s wage bill, and goals...

This research utilizes a compensating differential framework to measure the social benefits of minor league baseball teams. Consistent with findings at the major league level, individual housing observations from 138 metropolitan areas between 1993 and 2005 show that affiliated teams are associated with a significant 6 to 8% increase in rents in mi...

Previous research has examined the financial and volunteer problems of non-profit sport clubs in an isolated manner and has neglected the influence of sponsorship and subsidy funding, which we term as external funding, may have on both problems. The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of this external funding on financial and volunteer p...

We develop a consumer choice model of live attendance at a sporting event with reference-dependent preferences. The predictions of the model motivate the “uncertainty of outcome hypothesis” (UOH) as well as fans' desire to see upsets and to simply see the home team win games, depending on the importance of the reference-dependent preferences and lo...

In the 1990s, rural counties in the United States, which had been losing population, became the destinations for an increasing number of Hispanics, slowing and in some cases reversing population declines. In this paper, we examine whether faster growth in the Hispanic population is linked to faster growth in income per capita in rural counties. Our...

On June 30, 2012, a North American Association of Sports Economists-sponsored symposium session entitled "Sports Economics on Trial" was held in conjunction with the 2012 Western Economics Association International conference in San Francisco, California. The foci of the symposium were two-fold. First, speakers discussed relevant evidentiary rules...

This chapter investigates the constraints that leagues impose on teams for payrolls and individual compensation, concentrating on those issues which are distinct to salary caps and luxury taxes, especially on how each affects the distribution of playing talent, winning, and profits. Before turning to the empirical evidence of the effects of salary...

We analyze the relationship between attendance, outcome uncertainty, and team quality in the National Hockey League (NHL). Based on the results from a reduced form model of attendance at 6,054 regular season NHL games from 2005-2006 to 2009-2010, we find evidence that attendance increases when fans expect the home team to win, but holding this cons...

Sporting contests have provided mass entertainment throughout history. Ancient Mesoamericans had their ball games, the Greeks had the Olympic Games, and the Romans had many spectator sports such as gladiatorial contests and chariot races. As pointed out by George Orwell in the mid-twentieth century quote above, present-day versions of these ancient...

Hockey is inherently a rough, physical game. We analyze the impact of physical violence on the success of professional hockey clubs from the highest leagues in North America, Finland, and Germany. Using penalty min as an indicator of violence, the evidence is that incurring penalties will not improve the team’s points and may even reduce them. Actu...

We develop a consumer choice model of live attendance at a sporting event with reference-dependent preferences. The predictions of the model motivate the “uncertainty of outcome hypothesis” (UOH) as well as fan’s desire to see upsets and to simply see the home team win games, depending on the importance of the reference-dependent preferences and lo...

Copyright to papers in this working paper series rests with the authors and their assignees. Papers may be downloaded for personal use. Downloading of papers for any other activity may not be done without the written consent of the authors. Short excerpts of these working papers may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit is...

New sports stadiums and arenas bring renewal and prosperity. So at least Londoners have been promised as construction for the 2012 Olympics transforms their neighbourhoods. Are there grounds for the promises?Dennis Coates and Brad Humphreys look at the evidence from North America and find many unjustified claims.

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...

We examine the relationship between game day attendance, uncertainty of outcome, and team and facility quality in the National Football League. Based on results from a reduced form model of game day attendance at 5,495 regular season NFL games from the 1985-2008 seasons, we find weak evidence that attendance increases when fans expect the home team...

We investigate the relationship between interest group activity and investment by analyzing an unbalanced panel of observations on 126 countries over three time periods. We find that the number of interest groups in a nation is negatively related to investment, consistent with a sclerotic effect due to rent-seeking by interest groups. Our findings...

In the 1990s, rural areas and small towns in the United States, which had been losing population, became the destinations for an increasing number of Hispanic immigrants and their families, slowing and in some cases reversing population declines. In this paper, we examine whether faster growth in the Hispanic population is linked to faster growth i...

This paper analyzes the net impacts of college football games on the sales tax revenues and taxable sales of four mid-sized cities in Texas. The paper addresses the question in the title, but also asks whether state policy-makers might be justified in encouraging schools in their state to play one another based on the local economic impact those ga...

Cities compete for the opportunity to host events that draw large crowds of visitors. The argument is that these visitors bring with them lots of spending in hotels and restaurants, providing jobs for workers in the service industry, and generating sales tax revenues for the city. In many places, there is also a separate tax on hotel and motel acco...

This paper examines the relationship between hosting mega-events such as the Super Bowl, Olympics, and World Cup and rental housing prices in host cities. If mega-events are amenities for local residents, then rental housing prices can serve as a proxy for estimating residents' willingness to pay for these amenities. An analysis of rental prices in...

A growing literature examines the relationship between the on-field success of sports teams and prices of securities traded on stock exchanges. While much of the literature focuses on the effect of national teams on aggregate stock price measures, for example the relationship between the performance of a national team in World Cup competition and t...

Both institutional quality and institutional stability have been argued to stimulate economic growth. But to improve institutional quality, a country must endure a period of institutional change, which implies at least a little and possibly a lot of institutional instability. We investigate the growth effects of institutional quality and instabilit...

This paper uses data on players drafted in 1987 through 1989 covering both their collegiate and their professional careers. This time period is chosen because we wanted recent players whose playing days have ended. Our analysis evaluates the role of college productivity on draft position and the relationship between college career productivity, mea...

This paper reviews the empirical literature assessing the effects of subsidies for professional sports franchises and facilities. The evidence reveals a great deal of consistency among economists doing research in this area. That evidence is that sports subsidies cannot be justified on the grounds of local economic development, income growth or job...

This paper looks for evidence that either a NASCAR track or NASCAR-sanctioned event influences the monthly rents on residential units. The evidence is mixed, varying with the treatment of housing units located in or out of central cities of standard metropolitan statistical areas (SMSAs), as well as the manner in which missing housing and community...

Using a panel of international student test scores 1980 – 2000 (PISA and TIMSS), panel fixed effects estimates suggest that government spending decentralization is conducive to student performance. The effect does not appear to be mediated through levels of educational spending.

This paper explores the relationship between special-interest groups and volatility of GDP growth. In an unbalanced panel of 108 countries, we find a significant negative relationship between the number of interest groups in a country and the volatility of GDP growth.

This paper explores empirically the relation between special-interest groups and economic growth. Our analysis exploits new data on the number of groups observed across countries and time, in order to mitigate the identification problems associated with earlier studies. Also in contrast to earlier work, we examine the impact of groups on two source...

This paper explores the demand for attendance at professional sporting events using a data set that includes ticket prices and a price index reflecting prices for ancillary goods associated with attendance. Previous research has focused on attendance at Major League Baseball games, but this study also includes attendance at NBA and NFL contests. Th...

"This article explores the literature on the impact of professional sports teams and stadiums on their host communities. A large body of research has addressed these issues, some of it academic and much of it for hire by team and sport boosters. The broad conclusion of this literature is that stadiums and franchises are ineffective means to creatin...

This paper provides evidence that interest group activity is negatively related to both the level and the volatility of returns on a national stock market. These findings are robust to model specifications that include traditional growth regression policy variables as well as political, economic, and financial institutions variables. The estimated...

It is widely recognized that interest groups affect both microeconomic and macroeconomic outcomes. However, few researchers have attempted to empirically discern the factors that contribute to interest group activity. This paper provides a test of several theories of group formation in a panel setting. A nation's stability, socioeconomic developmen...

This study adds to our knowledge of the effects of mega-events like Super Bowls and Major League Baseball All-Star games by looking specifically at a long time-series of monthly sales tax revenues to assess the impact of these events on the host city’s revenue. The analysis indicates that sales tax revenues in Houston may be statistically significa...

In a recent article in this journal, Carlino and Coulson [G. Carlino, N.E. Coulson, Compensating differentials and the social benefits of the NFL, Journal of Urban Economics 56 (1) (2004) 25-50] report evidence that the presence of an NFL franchise in a city raises rents in the central part of the city by about 8%. We re-estimate their model using...

We investigate at the precinct-level the 2001 stadium referendum for the Allianz-Arena inMunich, where voters had to decide upon a projected site as well as on public subsidies for provision of transport infrastructure. This is the first analysis of a stadium referendum with respect to the spatial dimension outside the U.S. The new arena, which is...

Using a panel of international student test scores 1980 – 2000 (PISA and TIMSS), panel fixed effects estimates suggest that government spending decentralization is conducive to student performance. The effect does not appear to be mediated through levels of educational spending.

We investigate the effect of new facilities on attendance in professional baseball, basketball, and football from 1969 to 2001. We find a strong, persistent effect in baseball and basketball, and little effect in football. Size and duration estimates imply that baseball teams sell 2,500,794 additional tickets over the first eight seasons, basketbal...

This paper describes an experiment focused on measuring and explaining differences in students learning between online and face-to-face modes of instruction in college level principles of economics courses. Our results indicate that students in face-to-face sections scored better on the Test of Understanding College Economics (TUCE) than students i...

Coates and Humphreys (2000) found evidence that administrators affect enrollment supply and faculty demand using a panel of eleven public colleges and universities in Maryland, implying that institutions have enough market power to permit the preferences of administrators to influence these variables. We extend this framework to include political c...

Professional baseball has experienced numerous work-stoppages over the last 30 years, including three which resulted in the cancellation of games. Existing estimates of the demand for attendance at Major League Baseball games has found that only those events which caused the loss of games influenced attendance. This paper revisits the issue of whet...

This paper explores the impact of professional sports teams and stadiums on the wages of individuals employed in several narrowly defined occupational groups in cities in the United States. The occupational groups examined are among those that proponents of public funding of professional sports claim will benefit economically from these stadiums. O...

Local political and community leaders and the owners of professional sports teams frequently claim that professional sports facilities and franchises are important engines of economic development in urban areas. These structures and teams allegedly contribute millions of dollars of net new spending annually and create hundreds of new jobs, and prov...

This article examines the variety of institutions offering economics courses via the Internet in the fall 2000 semester and the methods of instruction used in those courses. Both 2- and 4-year colleges offer courses via the Internet and in about equal numbers. Research universities lag behind teaching institutions in web course offerings. Most inst...