STADIUMS AND ARENAS: ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OR ECONOMIC REDISTRIBUTION?

This article explores the literature on the impact of professional sports teams and stadiums on their host communities. A large body of research has addressed these issues, some of it academic and much of it for hire by team and sport boosters. The broad conclusion of this literature is that stadiums and franchises are ineffective means to creating local economic development, whether that is measured as income or job growth. There may be substantial public benefits from stadiums and franchises, but those too are insufficient to warrant large-scale subsidies by themselves. In combination with consumer surpluses from attendance, however, subsidies may be efficient. ( JEL R58, J30, H71, L83)     

Football in Greater Manchester: Growth Effects of Premiership Status Teams

An extensive body of economic literature suggests that in the United States, there is little gain to a city from using tax revenues to subsidize or in other ways support professional sports franchises. One of the difficulties with these studies is the stability of professional team location. Manchester, England provides an opportunity to examine the growth effects associated with adding and subtracting top tier teams from a single sport in a single area over the course of several decades. Five different Greater Manchester area teams have been in the Premiership with as few as one and as many as four in any given year since the founding of the Premiership. Using Greater Manchester borough level data from 1991 through 2013 we look for changes in gross value added overall and in categories associated with professional sports when Premiership status changes. We find no sustained role for Premiership status, but do find a one off gain in gross value added growth when a team is promoted.     

The Exploitation of Sports Market Forces： Case Study of American Professional Franchises

Three market forces play into the hands of American professional sports franchises, which are leagues, cities and monopoly power. In consideration of the American professional franchises, this paper studies how teams exploit the three market forces and achieve the optimal revenue.     

THE PECULIAR INTERNATIONAL ECONOMICS OF PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL IN EUROPE

Most European industries have a history of gradually opening international markets, with growing international capital mobility and increasing free trade of goods and services. However, although labour markets have been officially deregulated as well, there is much less international mobility of labour, mainly due to cultural and social barriers. An apparent exception to the rule been the industry of professional team sports in Europe, where the Bosman verdict in 1995 has freed the European player market while the product market was still nationally protected. In this paper, we try to derive the consequences of this deviant evolution in the European sports industry, concentrating on the competitive balance within and between national leagues and on the player salary levels, using a simplified ‘two country–four team’ model with quadratic revenue functions.     

NOVELTY EFFECTS OF NEW FACILITIES ON ATTENDANCE AT PROFESSIONAL SPORTING EVENTS

We investigate the effect of new facilities on attendance in professional baseball, basketball, and football from 1969 to 2001. We find a strong, persistent effect in baseball and basketball, and little effect in football. Size and duration estimates imply that baseball teams sell 2,500,794 additional tickets over the first eight seasons, basketball teams 293,878 over the first nine seasons, and football teams 137,792 over the first five seasons, implying an increase in revenues that could defray public subsidies that state and local governments provide for new sports construction projects. Rough calculations suggest that stadium subsidies are an inefficient method of subsidizing professional sports franchises. (JEL R39 , D12 , L83 )     

Heterogeneous sports participation and labour market outcomes in England

Based on a unique composite dataset measuring heterogeneous sports participation, labour market outcomes and local facilities provision, this article examines for the first time the association between different types of sports participation and employment and earnings in England. Clear associations between labour market outcomes and sports participation are established through matching estimation while controlling for some important confounding factors. The results, which are supplemented and supported by a formal sensitivity analysis, suggest a link between different types of sports participation to initial access to employment and then higher income opportunities with ageing. However, these vary between the genders and across sports. Specifically, the results suggest that team sports contribute most to employability, but that this varies by age across genders and that outdoor activities contribute most towards higher incomes.     

Labour quality and aggregate real-wage dynamics

The real wage plays an important role in many aggregate econometrics studies of the labour market. However, average wages, like any other average quantity, can change for two reasons – either through an underlying movement in the earnings potential of a unit of labour of given quality or, alternatively, through compositional changes which alter the relative proportions of different types of labour within the employed labour force. Using data from the General Household Survey to estimate earnings functions, the paper seeks to examine the contribution of these two factors for Britain from 1979 to 1989. It is shown that in periods of rising unemployment compositional changes can have a bigger effect on real-earnings growth than any underlying change in reward to labour of give quality. This raises the question of what economists actually are measuring when considering the behaviour of the aggregate real wage.     

Institutional determinants of the unemployment-earnings inequality trade-off

Most of the research efforts in recent years to explain international differences in unemployment and earnings inequality have placed the emphasis on the institutional components of the labour markets. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate which are the real effects of these characteristics on both phenomena using an ample set of data for different OECD countries. A Cluster analysis permits consideration about relatively heterogeneous models. The results of the econometric exercise show also that institutional factors have a greater impact on earnings inequality than on unemployment.     

Electricity demand estimation using proxy variables: some reservations

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the impact of asymmetric information upon labour market decisions. First, in the face of uncertainty concerning person-specific information, self-selection employment contracts develop which induce ‘sorting’ within the labour market. Second, we show the existence of a smaller share in investment in specific human capital for those who accept the self-selection contract relative to those who refuse such contracts. Thus, the earnings of those who accept such contracts are less responsive to changes in specific human capital than the earnings of those who refuse these contracts. Third, we applied the model to the market for professional teachers in British Columbia, Canada. The results of the empirical tests were shown to be consistent with the hypotheses proposed. In addition, once we controlled for the level of and the distribution to human capital the Public–Independent earnings differential fell from 64.3% to 23.9%.     

Differential rewards to, and contributions of, education in urban China's segmented labor markets

Abstract. Using worker data from a 1999–2000 urban enterprise survey, we examine the effects of education on the current earnings of continuously employed urban workers, migrants and laid off but subsequently re‐employed workers. We also decompose the earnings differentials between each of these groups of workers and then assess the contribution of education to explanations of the differentials. The empirical results demonstrate that returns to education increase with marketization and competition in the workplace. We also find educational attainment to be an important explanator of the earnings differentials between institutionally differentiated groups of workers in China's urban labor markets.     

Youth labor market expectations and job matching in sub-Saharan Africa: evidence from school-to-work transition surveys

In this paper, we investigate the factors that influence youth labour market expectations and outcomes. We also perform a job matching exercise to understand youth labour market dynamics in Sub-Saharan Africa. Our results show that youth education is an influential factor of youth employment expectations and employment, ceteris paribus. Higher educational attainments have a great impact on expecting and securing better jobs, particularly in the technical and professional fields. Youth with low educational attainments, particularly primary education and lower, have a higher tendency to expect to be employed in occupations with low job complexity. Our results indicate a severe job-skill mismatch in all occupational categories, both before and after the youth’s transition into the labour market. Using education as the only selection criterion, we found that less than 10 per cent of employment expectations match with skills required while 55 per cent and 34 per cent are under or over-educated for the jobs expected, respectively. Over and under education is a notable feature in youth labour markets in Sub-Saharan Africa. About 47 per cent of employed youth in the sample are overqualified for their respective jobs while 28 per cent are under qualified.     

The impact of the 1981 and 1994-1995 strikes on Major League Baseball attendance: a time-series analysis

Protracted labour disputes in professional team sports have become increasingly common in the past 30 years. Although each of the four major professional team sports in the USA have experienced episodes of labour strife, Major League Baseball has the longest and most frequent experience with labour-management conflict. Fans and the media claim with each incident permanent harm is done to baseball's standing as the national pastime. The purpose of this paper is to ascertain whether such claims can be supported by the empirical evidence. Utilizing time-series analysis, aggregate attendance at professional baseball games is examined. The evidence presented suggests that although the most protracted periods of labour discord had short-term impacts on attendance, there is no empirical evidence that these exogenous shocks had any long-term effects.     

PROFESSIONAL SPORTS, HURRICANE KATRINA, AND THE ECONOMIC REDEVELOPMENT OF NEW ORLEANS

Hurricane Katrina devastated the city of New Orleans in late August 2005, resulting in damage to much of the city’s sports infrastructure and the departure of both of New Orleans’ major‐league professional sports teams, the National Football League Saints and the National Basketball Association Hornets. What should the city provide in the way of financial accommodation to encourage them to return? This paper suggests that post‐Katrina New Orleans will have a difficult time retaining their franchises over the long run and in attempting to do so may hinder the redevelopment of the city. Furthermore, the very incentives designed to attract teams in the first place leave cities vulnerable to their departure in times of crisis. Finally, playing host to professional sports and mega‐events does have symbolic significance, but it is arguable that this is an amenity the city cannot currently afford. (JEL H25, H71, H40, L83, Q54)     

Analysis of the determinants of sports participation in Spain and England

This article investigates the role of sociodemographic characteristics, educational and economic variables on sports participation in a comparative way in two European countries: Spain and England. Adopting a broad concept of sport, as in the common European approach, we analyse the determinants of sports participation in 40 different professional and nonprofessional sports and recreational activities in both countries. The research involves a comparative analysis between the data of England and Spain based on two logistic regressions. The regression equation of every country tests the effect of 17 binary explanatory variables on a dependent binary variable for participation. Higher education level, professional occupation, younger age and being male are all factors associated with more sports participation. Although there is no difference in the direction of the factor effects on participation between England and Spain, there is considerable variation in their relative strength, which has sport policy implications in the two nations.     

Reforming the Labour Market: An Assessment of the UK Policies of the Thatcher Era

Under Thatcher the United Kingdom introduced a major program of labour market deregulation, claimed to have made the United Kingdom one of the least regulated labour markets in the OECD. This paper reviews the measures implemented and assesses their impact. Trade union membership declined steeply, and collective bargaining was curtailed even more sharply. The impact of the legislation curbing unions can be exaggerated, given that it coincided with wider developments. At the microeconomic level there is some evidence that the decline of unions contributed to productivity gains, but no clear evidence on employment, investment, profitability or wage premia. UK macroeconomic performance improved, but not dramatically. The most marked features of the more flexible labour markets are the growth of part-time and temporary work, while job insecurity has become a common perception. The most striking development is the growth in earnings inequality, in part reflecting the weakening of collective bargaining. The evolution and consequences of inequality will be a major criterion in assessing the moves to labour market flexibility.     

Comparison of cosmetic earnings management for the developed markets and emerging markets: Some empirical evidence from the United States and Taiwan

This study examines the effect of the implementation of corporate governance regulations on cosmetic earnings management in developed and emerging markets respectively. Using Benford's Law, the analysis employs 84,870 positive earnings observations for all publicly listed US and Taiwan companies from 1990 to 2011.The empirical results show that, regardless of developed markets and emerging markets, the phenomenon of cosmetic earnings management exists. In contrast to developed markets, corporate managers of emerging markets have stronger incentives to manipulate earnings. More importantly, it was found that the degree of earnings management is significantly less after implementing corporate governance regulations both in developed and emerging markets. This result suggests that the implementation of corporate governance regulations plays an important role in reducing the earnings manipulative behavior. The findings of the study add more evidence to the ongoing debate about the effectiveness of corporate governance regulations in preventing earnings management.     

The Earnings of Immigrant Men in Australia: Assimilation, Cohort Effects, and Macroeconomic Conditions

This paper analyzes the earnings of immigrant men in Australia using data from Income Distribution Surveys for 1982, 1986 and 1990. The paper expands on the standard approach used in the literature to evaluate immigrant earnings adjustment by considering the impact of current labour market conditions and conditions at labour market entry on current earnings. Immigrants from non-English speaking backgrounds have significantly lower earnings on arrival in Australia compared with native-born males, and this gap is not narrowed as years in Australia increase. However, poorer macroeconomic conditions at entry are found to have a significantly smaller negative effect on the earnings of immigrants from non-English speaking backgrounds than native-born males.     

Racial discrimination in umpire voting: an (arguably) unexpected result

Using data from an official most valuable player award in professional sport, we test for the presence of discrimination by match officials (umpires), who are responsible for ranking the top three players within each match. These umpires are found to award significantly more votes to (and have a higher probability of voting for) players identified as (Australian) Indigenous, after controlling for within-match production. The result offers further evidence on racial discrimination, and runs counter to numerous analogous studies both in sport, as well as in labour and other socio-economic outcomes in general.     

Does the Commercialization of Voluntary Organizations ‘Crowd out’ Voluntary Work?

This article examines the relationship among voluntary labour supply and commercial income for Norwegian sport voluntary organizations. Empirical results using cross–sectional data on voluntary sport organizations in Norway and on their members show a decrease in voluntary work from an increase in commercial income. Voluntary work and commercial income appear as substitutable resources. Nevertheless, the results have to be differentiated according to the professional situation of the volunteers.
A crowding out effect between voluntary work and commercial resources is at play for non–professionally active individuals whereas professionally active individuals seem to be indifferent to the level of commercial resources in deciding whether to volunteer or not.