Victor A. Matheson

College of the Holy Cross · Department of Economics

In the processes required to host a sports mega-event, corruption has been prevalent on numerous occasions, leading to unnecessary costs becoming the ultimate responsibility of a host government’s taxpayers. Little progress has been made in the prevention of such behaviour. In this chapter, the authors examine the history of corruption in sports me...

Among his colleagues in North America and Europe, Ross Booth was synonymous with Australian sports economics. He was a dedicated scholar, a champion footballer, and even a better bloke. He will be deeply missed.

Défendre l’utilisation de fonds publics pour financer les Jeux olympiques (JO), c’est traiter cette allocation d’argent comme un investissement, plutôt que comme une dépense pour estimer l’impact économique de l’événement. Techniquement, cela revient à soutenir que le rendement économique des JO est supérieur à zéro et qu’il n’existe pas de meilleu...

This paper provides the total costs and public contributions for every stadium constructed in the NFL, MLB, MLS, NBA, and NHL between 1990 and 2023. The data show that $75 billion (in 2023 dollars) has been spent on stadium construction in that time period with taxpayers contributing $34 billion of this amount. Following the Great Recession, the av...

This paper estimates the public benefits to homeowners in cities with NFL franchises by examining housing prices rather than housing rents. Similar to Carlino and Coulson (2004), we find that the presence of an NFL franchise has no effect on housing prices in the entire SMSA, but unlike their previous finding, the presence of an NFL franchise also...

The Super Bowl is America’s premier sporting event. This chapter details basic economic facts about the game and examines the controversy surrounding the purported economic impact of the game on host communities. While the league and sports boosters claim that the game brings up to a $500 million economic impact to host cities, a review of the lite...

The Super Bowl clearly makes teams and their players much happier. A championship can define the career of all the people involved. But what is the championship worth financially? We begin with the impact winning a Super Bowl has on a team’s revenue. Because the NFL shares so much of its revenue, winning games doesn’t seem to impact a team’s earnin...

The NFL produces an expensive halftime show in order to maintain its large television audience. The artists who preform at halftime are barely compensated by the NFL. An exploration of the benefits to the performer in the areas of music consumption and future concert revenues were tested using the sign test. Music consumption was found to significa...

Ex ante economic impact studies of the Super Bowl show that the presence of the game in a city does not provide the level of economic benefit that proponents of the game claim it has. Halftime performers appear to perform in order to gain expose for their music. Their performance results in significantly higher levels of music consumption. The impa...

Professional football grew from the popularity of the collegiate game. The NFL began as a small, regional league and grew to become the preeminent sport in the United States. As it grew in size and financial stability, the NFL faced several challenges from rival leagues. In 1966, the NFL agreed to slowly merge with the AFL and to establish a World...

The Super Bowl is the most watched sporting event in the United States. But what does participating in this event mean for the players, the halftime performers, and the cities who host the games? Is there an economic benefit from being a part of the Super Bowl and if so, how much? This Palgrave Pivot examines the economic consequences for those who...

Roughly seven years before an Olympic Games, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) accepts bids from countries to host an Olympics. Subsequently, the IOC determines and announces to the world who has won (and lost) the right to host. Contrary to prior evidence, we find the announcements do not affect the bidding countries' stock markets. We com...

Corruption in the processes required to host a sports mega-event has been common throughout history. This has often led to unnecessary costs that have ultimately been borne by the host government’s taxpayers. Little progress has been made in the prevention of such behaviour. In this chapter, we examine the history of corruption in sports mega-event...

Mega-sporting events such as the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup are expensive affairs. Host countries often justify the spending required to stage these events by predicting that mega-events will draw large numbers of tourists. This paper analyzes monthly foreign tourist arrivals into Brazil between 2003 and 2015...

We use daily hotel occupancy, price, and revenue data to analyse the economic impact of the 2008 and 2012 Democratic and Republican national conventions. We find that political conventions generate approximately 29,000 room nights of lodging, though this figure is partially offset by lower hotel occupancy during the week before and, to a lesser ext...

In North America and Europe, many sports betting operations are state-owned and could be argued to suffer from inefficiency and failure to innovate. Privatization of state betting operations could raise efficiency and lead to more product innovation. In this chapter the authors use the case of the Illinois State Lottery to analyse whether privatiza...

This chapter examines how the Affordable Care Act (ACA) might affect the analysis of future care costs. Prior to the ACA, victims’ future health care costs would generally be paid for out-of-pocket since plaintiffs typically had limited access to insurance. Nowadays, plaintiffs can obtain insurance that will cover a significant portion of future me...

We use daily airplane arrival data from 2004 to 2015 from Hawaii’s Department of Business, Economic Development, and Tourism to determine the net change in arrivals around a variety of sporting events. We find that only one event generates a positive and significant net impact on airplane arrivals: the Honolulu Marathon, which generates roughly 980...

In this paper, we explore the costs and benefits of hosting the Olympic Games. On the cost side, there are three major categories: general infrastructure such as transportation and housing to accommodate athletes and fans; specific sports infrastructure required for competition venues; and operational costs, including general administration as well...

Over the past decade or so, the field of sports economics has grown from an obscure niche to a widely accepted area of study in mainstream economics. Obviously, public interest in sports dates back many centuries to at least the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and even Smith (1776) briefly discusses the economics of recreation in The Wealth...

Over the past half century, there has been an increasing prevalence of legalized gambling in the U.S. At the same time, there is a general recognition, empirically supported in the economics literature, that spending on lottery and gaming products tends to be regressive in nature. In addition, gambling addiction is a widely acknowledged social prob...

The National Football League (NFL) has recently received significant negative media attention surrounding the safety of its players, revolving largely around the long term health risks of playing the sport. Recent premature deaths and instances of suicide associated with chronic traumatic encephalopathy and other football related injuries have brou...

Over recent years the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) nations have secured the right to host several major international sporting events. Growth in tourism from developed countries is crucial to turn these events into a successful strategy for economic development. In this paper we use monthly country-by-country arrival data t...

Plaintiffs in personal injury lawsuits are entitled to compensation for future medical expenses. We argue that the “guaranteed issue” and “individual mandate” requirements of the recently passed Affordable Care Act (ACA) will allow victims to address a large portion of their health needs through the purchase of a simple health insurance plan rather...

This paper evaluates the magnitude and the economic impact of NFL mega-events including the Pro Bowl and Super Bowl. The paper also reviews the theory behind the usual findings that the observed economic benefits of mega-events are almost always a fraction of the benefits claimed a priori.

We estimate the impact of sporting events and franchises on local crime rates using the technique developed in Arellano and Bond (2001). For events, we consider the presence of Major League Baseball, National Basketball Association, National Football League and National Hockey League franchises as well as whether a city held one of the respective c...

The past two decades have witnessed an explosion of scholarly research in the field of the economics of sports, and an increasing acceptance from the mainstream of the economics discipline. Of course, common interest in athletics is nothing new. As noted by the first paper in this symposium, spectator sports date back to at least the early Greeks a...

Sport – insbesondere der Hochleistungssport – ist ein Faszinosum, das als Plattform für gesellschaftliche Anliegen genutzt wird. Hierauf gründen die unterschiedlichen Interessen am aktiven und passiven Sport und das staatliche Interesse am Spitzensport. In den meisten Ländern ist der Spitzensport nationales Anliegen: So bilden Staaten in nationalen...

This paper adds to the literature on competitive balance in college sports by comparing men's and women's NCAA basketball. Using data from the Division I National Championships, we find evidence consistent with the idea that women’s college basketball is less competitively balanced than men’s college basketball. We argue that this difference may be...

This paper provides an empirical examination of impact the 1994 FIFA World Cup in the United States on local employment. In contrast to ex ante economic impact reports that suggest large increases in employment due to the tournament, an ex post examination of employment in 9 host metropolitan areas finds no significant impact on employment from hos...

This paper provides an overview of techniques that can be used to estimate the economic impact of stadiums, events, championships, and franchises on local economies. Utilizing data from National Collegiate Athletic Association championships, this paper highlights the potential problems that can be made if city and time effects are not handled and u...

This paper examines the profitability of Division I athletic programs at colleges and universities in the United States under a variety of accounting definitions of profit. The data identify several broad themes. First, a majority of athletic departments rely heavily on direct and indirect subsidization of their programs by the student body, the in...

This paper examines public financing of professional sports facilities with a focus on both early and recent developments in taxpayer subsidization of spectator sports. The paper explores both the magnitude and the sources of public funding for professional sports facilities. .

A number of authors have identified the determinants of success in international sporting competitions such as the Olympics and soccer’s World Cup. This paper serves to update past work on international women’s soccer performance given the rapid development of the game over the past decade. We compare the determinants of men’s international soccer...

Lotteries represent an important source of government revenues in many states and countries, so they are of interest to public finance economists. In addition, lotteries provide researchers interested in microeconomic theory and consumer behavior with a type of experimental lab that allows economists to explore these topics. This paper surveys the...

This paper presents an annotated bibliography of all papers relating to the economics of lotteries as of early to mid 2011. All published scholarly papers that could be identified by the authors are included along with the published abstract where available.

While presidential inaugurations routinely attract hundreds of thousands or more visitors to Washington, DC, for the quadrennial celebration, the authors' examination of employment from the Current Employment Statistics survey from 1939 to the present, and both employment and unemployment from the Current Population Survey from 1977 to the present,...

The local, state, and federal governments, along with the Salt Lake City Organizing Committee, spent roughly $1.9 billion in direct costs related to planning and hosting the 2002 Winter Olympic Games. In this paper, we investigate whether these expenditures increased employment. At the state level, we find strong evidence it increased leisure relat...

In 1980, Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon placed a famous bet on whether the prices of a bundle of natural resources would rise or fall over the ensuing decade. Simon won the bet as the real price of the bundle fell significantly, and the result of this bet has been taken as proof that technological progress is likely to overcome that of any Neo-Malth...

Tournament design is of crucial importance in competitive sports. The primary goal of effective tournament design is to provide incentives for the participants to maximize their performance both during the tournament and in the time period leading up to the tournament. In spectator sports, a secondary goal of tournament design is to also promote in...

Over the past 20 years, state and provincial governments in North America have expanded legal gambling opportunities to consumers. One of the primary policy goals of this expansion of gambling opportunities has been to increase government revenues. Gambling is an attractive source of new government revenues because consumers are relatively insensit...

This paper estimates the public benefits to homeowners in cities with NFL franchises by examining housing prices rather than housing rents. In contrast to Carlino and Coulson (2004) we find that the presence of an NFL franchise has no effect on housing prices in a city. Furthermore, we also test whether the presence and size of the subsidy to the t...

This paper provides an empirical examination of the economic impact of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions on local economies. Our analysis from 1970–2005 of the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the country, including all cities that have hosted one of the national conventions during this time period, finds that the presence of the R...

This paper examines pork-barrel spending within states and finds that per capita earmarked funding is correlated with the inverse of a state's population, the presence of a Republican Congressional delegation, and the tenure of a state's senior Senator.

It has been 15 years since Cook and Clotfelter described the scale economies associated with state-run lotto games in an American Economic Review article entitled “The Peculiar Scale Economies of Lotto.” U.S. states with larger populations are identified as having the ability to offer games with larger jackpots to attract higher sales per capita. T...

Critics of economic impact studies that purport to show that mega-events such as the Olympics bring large benefits to the communities “lucky” enough to host them frequently cite the use of inappropriate multipliers as a primary reason why these impact studies overstate the true economic gains to the hosts of these events. This brief paper shows in...

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...

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.