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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #344715 in Books
• Published on: 1997-10-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 540 pages

About the Author
Roger G. Noll and Andrew Zimbalist have consulted for players associations and owners in professional sports. Noll is professor of economics and director of the Public Policy Program at Stanford University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of numerous books, including the classic Government and the Sports Business (Brookings, 1974). Zimbalist is professor of economics at Smith College and the author of several books, including Baseball and Billions: A Probing Look Inside the Big Business of Our National Pastime (Basic Books, 1992). He was also a consultant for the nine-part documentary on baseball in America by Ken Burns.

Customer Reviews

Good for research
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
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.