Determinants of Public Funding for Professional Athletic Venues

• Main Author: Holland, John K
• Format: Others
• Published: Scholarship @ Claremont 2014
• Subjects: Stadium; Public; Funding; Determinants; Finance; Finance and Financial Management; Public Economics
• Online Access: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/903; http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1929&context=cmc_theses

This paper examines the financing of professional athletic venues and why certain franchises are able to obtain high percentages of overall stadium funding from the public. Existing literature shows the negligible effect of new athletic venues on the local economy and per capita income, and therefore the benefits from such a project are largely intangible. I use an ordinary least squares regression and show that the more successful a team is the less public funding they tend to receive. I also find that broad city statistics do not represent the specific areas that policy makers consider when making decisions about spending public money.