| Abstract: |
The paper employs data from 2,884 matches, of which 158 were televised, in the
second tier of English football (currently known as The Football League
Championship). It builds a model of the determinants of attendance that is
designed to yield estimates of the proportionate changes in the size of crowds
resulting from games being shown on either free-to-air or subscription based
channels. The model has two innovatory features. First, it controls for the
market size of home and away teams very precisely by including local
population measures constructed from the application of GIS software and
information on competition from other clubs. Second, it employs the
Hausman-Taylor random effects estimator in order to take explicit account of
the endogeneity of the television coverage variable and of other variables
typically included in earlier studies based on ordinary least squares or fixed
effects models of attendance. The Hausman-Taylor estimates of the impact of
broadcasting are greater than those reported in such studies. In the case of
free-to-air television, the negative impact is estimated as over 20 percent
but for subscription television, which carried most of the transmissions, the
negative effect was only of the order of 5 percent. |