Sports, Jobs, and Taxes: The Economic Impact of Sports Teams and Stadiums | 
 enlarge | Author: Roger G. Noll
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $22.45
You Save: $2.50 (10%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 100456
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 540
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6 x 1.4
ISBN: 0815761112
Dewey Decimal Number: 338.437960973
EAN: 9780815761112
ASIN: 0815761112
Publication Date: October 21, 1997
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
America is in the midst of a sports building boom. Professional sports teams are demanding and receiving fancy new playing facilities that are heavily subsidized by government. In many cases, the rationale given for these subsidies is that attracting or retaining a professional sports franchise--even a minor league baseball team or a major league pre-season training facility--more than pays for itself in increased tax revenues, local economic development, and job creation.
But are these claims true? To assess the case for subsidies, this book examines the economic impact of new stadiums and the presence of a sports franchise on the local economy. It first explores such general issues as the appropriate method for measuring economic benefits and costs, the source of the bargaining power of teams in obtaining subsidies from local government, the local politics of attracting and retaining teams, the relationship between sports and local employment, and the importance of stadium design in influencing the economic impact of a facility.
The second part of the book contains case studies of major league sports facilities in Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Indianapolis, San Francisco, and the Twin Cities, and of minor league stadiums and spring training facilities in baseball. The primary conclusions are: first, sports teams and facilities are not a source of local economic growth and employment; second, the magnitude of the net subsidy exceeds the financial benefit of a new stadium to a team; and, third, the most plausible reasons that cities are willing to subsidize sports teams are the intense popularity of sports among a substantial proportion of voters and businesses and the leverage that teams enjoy from the monopoly position of professional sports leagues.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Good for research February 2, 2006
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I used this as the backbone of my senior paper in college. However, I found that the authors did quite a bit of stretching to say that "no impact could be found". My own research has concluded that stadia can not be evaluated in purely economic terms as they chose to do.
That said, this book is good for grounding readers in a number of case studies, and should provide a road map to stadium advocates as to the flaws in previous proposals.
 Statistics, Numbers, and Evidence July 16, 2000
15 out of 16 found this review helpful
Andrew Zimbalist is back with his newest book on the economics of sports, Sports, Jobs, and Taxes. After writing Baseball to Billions, the Smith College professor returns with this publication on the effects of building stadiums in major markets. Zimbalist co-edits the book with Roger G. Noll, a director of the Public Policy Program at Stanford University. The two men examine many different cities and their various plans that involved new sports facilities. Using a dizzying assault of numbers and statistics, Sports, Jobs, and Taxes proves case by case how employment, taxes and urban development were either unaffected or negatively influenced by the facilities built in the respective cities. While such examples as Minneapolis, Chicago, and Cincinnati display evidence to support the editors' theories, the repetitiveness of these chapters' points begin to wear on the reader. Still, one comes away fully understanding what is continually stressed by Zimbalist and Noll. Sports facilities and the teams that play in them do not enhance local economies, do little for job creation, and never make up for the cost of higher taxes.
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