The Abstract: Olympics Don't Make People Happy, but the World Cup Does

I have a directory on my work-sanctioned Mac where I store PDFs of studies I'd like to write about or review to see if they're worth highlighting. And over the past year and one month since I started this blog, the directory has slowly grown to an unmanageable size: Finder tells me that there are 2,343 papers, most of which are 30+ pages, just waiting for me to digest.

That's not going to happen. And I'm not much one for daily or semi-daily recurring features, but I'm going to give this one a try. I think the title, The Abstract, speaks for itself. Today's theme is sports:

The widely proclaimed economic benefits of hosting major sporting events have received substantial criticism by academic economists and have been shown to be negligible, at best. The aim of this paper is to formally examine the existence of another potential impact: national wellbeing or the so-called "feelgood" factor. Using data on self-reported life satisfaction (happiness) for twelve European countries we test for the impact of hosting and of national athletic success on happiness. Our data covers three different major events: the Olympic Games, the FIFA World Cup and the UEFA European Championship. We find that the "feelgood" factor associated with hosting football events is large and significant, but that the impact of national athletic success on happiness...is statistically insignificant.

The Size and Scope of the Sports Industry in the United States

We estimate the economic scope of the sports industry in the United States. Drawing on a variety of data sources, we investigate the economic size of sport participation, sports viewing, and the supply and demand side of the sports market in the United States. Estimates of the size of the sports industry based on aggregate demand and aggregate supply range from $44 to $73 billion in 2005. In addition, participation in sports and the opportunity time cost of attending sporting events are important, but hard to value, components of the industry.

Assessing the Economic Impact of Sports Facilities on Residential Property Values

This paper evaluates the intangible benefits of professional sports facilities, in terms of the economic impacts on residential property values, using a spatial hedonic approach applied to Nationwide Arena, home of the Columbus Blue Jackets and Crew Stadium, home of the Columbus Crew. The results show that the presence of both facilities has a significant positive effect on the value of surrounding houses and this positive effect decreases as the distance from the facilities increases. In particular...housing values increase by 1.75% for each 10% decrease in the distance from the house to the facility. In dollar values the average increase in house value is $2,214 per house and the total increased house value associated with a 10% decrease in distance to Nationwide Arena is around $21 million for the 9,504 houses in the sample. Based on data from the 2000 Census, the aggregate value of the willingness to pay for proximity to Nationwide Arena within one mile of the facility is $222.5 million; the aggregate value of the willingness to pay for proximity to Crew Stadium within one mile of the facility is $35.7 million. While both these facilities were built using private financing, the willingness to pay should not depend on the financing of the facility. If other similar publicly financed sports facilities generate similar willingness to pay in the surrounding areas, then this willingness to pay does not appear to be large enough to justify public subsidies for the construction of modern professional sports facilities.

Arenas vs. Multifunctional Stadia - Which Do Spectators Prefer?

Following the argumentation that the atmosphere in an arena is significantly better than that of a multipurpose facility and that spectators prefer such an atmosphere, many of the old European multifunctional stadia have been rebuilt into arenas during the last decade or so...The aim of this study was to measure the effect of a mono-functional arena specially suited for soccer on soccer spectator figures in Germany...[the results] displayed a significant increase in the average number of spectators of around 4,800 spectators per season in such a mono-functional arena. This translates into a substantial increase of about 18.7% against the mean value of 25,602 spectators per Bundesliga game. This effect is almost twice as high as that of the novelty effect...In contrast to the novelty effect, which only lasts for a few years, the effect of a "pure soccer arena" is enduring.