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on Sports and Economics |
| By: | Victor Matheson (Department of Economics, College of the Holy Cross); Robert Baade (Department of Economics and Business, Lake Forest College) |
| Abstract: | Hurricane Katrina devastated the city of New Orleans in late August 2005, and debates are now underway across the country concerning strategies for reconstructing the City. Both of New Orleans’s professional sports teams, the National Football League Saints and the National Basketball Association Hornets, left the city in the wake of the storm, and the question of what the city should provide in the way of financial accommodation to encourage them to return should be considered in devising a reconstruction plan. New Orleans has hosted a disproportionate share of mega-sports events in the United States given its size and demographics. An important question concerns whether these events have contributed enough to the New Orleans economy to justify reinvestment in infrastructure to restore New Orleans’s place as a leading host of professional sports and mega-events in the United States. This paper examines the economic impact of professional sports on the New Orleans economy and concludes that the redevelopment efforts of New Orleans are better directed at first providing infrastructure that will encourage the return of its middle class citizenry and the restoration of its culture. Playing host to professional sports and mega-events does have symbolic significance, but it is arguable that the city cannot afford to invite guests until it has the means to accommodate them. |
| Keywords: | sports, public finance, economic impact, New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina |
| JEL: | H25 H71 H40 L83 Q54 |
| Date: | 2006–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:spe:wpaper:0601&r=spo |
| By: | Carrillo, Juan D |
| Abstract: | This paper proposes a rule to determine the winner of a soccer match which is different from the traditional penalty shoot-outs at the end of extra time. We show that games can be more attractive if penalties are shot before extra time and the outcome counts only if the tie is preserved during extra time. In general, this rule will promote offense by the team that loses the penalty shoot-outs and it will promote defense by the team that wins the penalty shoot-outs. We provide conditions on the marginal effect of offensive play in the probabilities of scoring and conceding a goal such that the proposed rule dominates the current one. Last, we determine a class of functions that satisfies these conditions. More generally, the paper shows how the ordering of tasks may affect the incentives to exert and allocate effort. |
| Keywords: | effort allocation; implicit incentives; sports economics |
| JEL: | Z0 |
| Date: | 2006–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:5579&r=spo |
| By: | Robert Kaestner; Xin Xu |
| Abstract: | In this study, we examined the association between girls’ participation in high school sports and the physical activity, weight, body mass and body composition of adolescent females during the 1970s when girls’ sports participation was dramatically increasing as a result of Title IX. We found that increases in girls’ participation in high school sports, a proxy for expanded athletic opportunities for adolescent females, were associated with an increase in physical activity and an improvement in weight and body mass among girls. In contrast, adolescent boys experienced a decline in physical activity and an increase in weight and body mass during the period when girls’ athletic opportunities were expanding. Taken together, these results strongly suggest that Title IX and the increase in athletic opportunities among adolescent females it engendered had a beneficial effect on the health of adolescent girls. |
| JEL: | I12 I18 |
| Date: | 2006–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:12113&r=spo |
| By: | William Chan; Pascal Courty; Hao Li |
| Abstract: | In a dynamic model of sports competition, we show that when spectators care only about the level of effort exerted by contestants, rewarding schemes that depend linearly on the final score difference provide more efficient incentives for efforts than schemes based only on who wins and loses. This result is puzzling because rank order schemes are the dominant forms of reward in sports competitions. The puzzle can be explained if one takes into account the fact that spectators also care about the suspense in the game. We define spectators\\\' demand for suspense as greater utility derived from contestants\\\' efforts when the game is closer. As the demand for suspense increases, so does the advantage of rank order schemes relative to linear score difference schemes. When the demand for suspense is sufficiently high, the optimal rank order scheme dominates all linear score difference schemes, and with plausible additional restrictions, it dominates a broad class of incentive schemes that reward contestants on the basis of the final score difference. |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tor:tecipa:tecipa-223&r=spo |