John Jasina
Kurt Rotthoff

Stadium boosters have long used the promise of economic development as a means to gain public support for financing local sports teams. Past research has shown little or no impact on employment or income when viewed at the MSA level. This paper expands the current literature on the economic impact of professional sports franchises. Following Coates and Humphreys (2003), we look at employment and wages at the county level using detailed SIC and NAICS industry codes. We find mixed results on employment within a county but find a negative effect on the payrolls within specific industries.Read more

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

Andrew Zimbalist
Judith Grant Long

 Conventional wisdom has it that the public share of stadium and arena construction costs has been falling in recent years. Many have attributed this perceived decrease in part to the emergence of the academic literature in the 1990s, finding that one cannot expect that a new team or sport facility by itself would promote economic development in an area. We find that the conventional wisdom is incorrect. In this paper, we use both the available reported cost data as well as adjusted cost data and find that trends in public financing are considerably more complex than...Read more