FiT Publishing

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

 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