Articles in this issue:

• Cities and Professional Sports Teams: A Dynamic Bargaining Model, pp. 64-78

  Jeffrey G. Owen

  William J. Polley

  We investigate the phenomenon in which professional sports teams receive subsidies from cities to induce them to remain in the city. These subsidies often take the form of public funding for a new stadium. Using a dynamic model of bargaining with asymmetric threat points, we show that teams can extract increasing concessions from the city, culminating with the partial public funding of a new stadium. The model is consistent with many observed city/team bargaining relationships where lease renegotiations often favor the team over the city as teams use the threat of relocation as leverage in...Read more

• Life-Cycle Demand for Major League Baseball, pp. 79-93

  Seung C. Ahn and Young H. Lee

  Static microeconomic theory predicts that monopolists set prices in the elastic range of the demand curves for their products. However, for nearly thirty years, most of the empirical studies of sports-game attendance demand have failed to support this prediction. This paper shows that in a multiple time-period model, professional team owners are likely to set ticket prices at which attendance demand is price-inelastic if the intertemporal elasticity of substitution for games is small and/or if attending games is habit-forming. Our empirical study shows that these two conditions hold for...Read more

• The Stadium Game in Canadian Hockey League Communities, pp. 94-107

  Daniel S. Mason

  Ernest A. Buist

  Jonathon Edwards

  Gregory H. Duquette

  The purpose of this paper is to review arena construction since 1995 in small- to mid-sized Canadian communities, where Canadian Hockey League (CHL) teams act as anchors for their respective facilities. Following an overview of facilities, development patterns are compared across leagues within the CHL, and to the process that occurs at the major league level. Like their big league counterparts, arguments are made that teams and arenas are critical to the status and economic health of communities. However, the arena is the critical driver of city growth strategies, while the CHL franchise...Read more

• The Importance of Import Substitution in Marathon Economic Impact Analysis pp. 108-118

  Steven Cobb

  Douglas J. Olberding

  Marathon running has experienced considerable growth in recent years, fueled both by an increase in participation rates and by a corresponding increase in the number marathons staged each year. Because marathons have a presumed economic benefit, there also has been growth in the number of marathon-related economic impact studies. However, these studies calculate incorrectly, or omit altogether, an important source of impact: the impact generated when local runners use their home-city marathon as a substitute for participating in an alternative marathon out-of-town. Given that this pattern...Read more