John Charles Bradbury

Public financing of major league sports venues has been widely studied, but government support for minor league facilities has not been systematically documented. This study introduces a new database of Minor League Baseball stadium funding to measure the prevalence and magnitude of subsidies. State and local governments have spent $7 billion constructing and renovating 134 minor league ballparks for Major League Baseball (MLB) affiliates, raising important policy implications for moderately sized municipalities. Using MLB's reorganization of its minor leagues as a natural experiment, the analysis finds no income differences between cities that lost or retained teams, undermining the economic rationale for taxpayer subsidization.

In a recent issue of Economic Development Quarterly , Johnson et al. took issue with the contention that there is a strong scholarly consensus that professional sports facilities are not advisable public investments. Johnson et al. argued that opinion surveys of economists may be flawed, research reaches somewhat ambiguous conclusions, and that existing reviews of academic literature do not provide a balanced assessment of the evidence. Thus, Johnson et al. concluded that a judicious policy approach requires weighing the costs and benefits of individual stadium projects. This reply evaluates these claims and demonstrates that they do not have merit; therefore, it is accurate to describe the academic consensus as generally opposed to public underwriting of professional sports venues.

This report provides a comprehensive retrospective assessment of the Atlanta Braves' Truist Park development using publicly-available data and standard empirical methods to estimate its economic effects on Cobb County. The key findings are: - Sales tax revenue increased following the stadium’s opening; however, much of the spending associated with the stadium development appears to have come at the expense of existing Cobb businesses; thus, net gains to commercial activity have been small. - Cobb property value growth, near the stadium and countywide, has been typical for the Atlanta region, which does not reflect net positive economic or social benefits from the stadium, nor has the stadium’s presence expanded the County’s budget through increased property tax assessments. - Stadium-induced tax revenue has fallen well short of covering Cobb’s public investment in the stadium, costing taxpayers nearly $15 million per year to service stadium debt and fund operations, which translates to approximately $50 per Cobb household. Overall, Cobb’s experience with Truist Park has been similar to most other stadium projects, which fail to generate large economic benefits to host communities.

This study examines the effect of a Major League Baseball team moving to Cobb County, Georgia on attracting visitors by observing changes in hotel room rentals. We employ a synthetic difference-in-differences event study approach to measure the causal effect of the team’s interjurisdictional relocation within metropolitan Atlanta on hotel stays and room prices. We identify no meaningful impact of the team’s move at the county level or in close proximity to the stadium. In total, the findings are not consistent with the hypothesis that sports venues offer a channel to increase community wealth through tourism.

This analysis examines the impact of new stadiums on consumer demand for sports spectatorship in the four major US‐based professional sports leagues. Estimates from difference‐in‐differences event studies identify a transitory attendance shock from new venues that diminishes to pre‐stadium‐treatment levels within a decade. The updated estimates confirm the existence of the novelty effect in modern facilities and identify subtle differences in magnitude, certainty, and duration across leagues. Revenue estimates indicate that the substantial financial returns from constructing new stadiums likely incentivize the premature replacement of host venues when combined with typical public subsidy levels.

This article informs public policy toward professional sports stadiums, which state and local governments routinely subsidize. Our analysis provides a history of stadium construction and funding in the U.S., documenting trends that portend a forthcoming new wave of stadiums. Despite robust evidence that stadiums are not economic development catalysts and confer limited social benefits, public outlays persist and exhibit a positive growth trajectory, which could prove costly to government budgets in coming decades. We review contemporary justifications for public subsidies, focusing on proposed salutary development and budgeting strategies. Economic research continues to demonstrate that stadiums remain poor public investments, and optimal public funding of professional sports venues is substantially less than typical subsidy levels. We examine economic, political, and institutional factors that contribute to the disconnect between research and policy, and we provide recommendations to promote sound public policy.

Although researchers have demonstrated conclusively that sports stadiums are not economic development catalysts, stadium projects that include preplanned ancillary developments have been proposed as a salutary strategy to overcome the widely observed dismal economic performance of standalone stadiums. Using an objective rubric for evaluating economic impact studies, we review a commissioned pro forma model that claims to demonstrate net positive fiscal impacts of two prominent publicly-financed stadium-anchored developments. Using assumptions informed by existing research and established discipline standards, the model estimates substantial negative returns for both projects (−$40 to −$60 million in Worcester, Massachusetts and −$100 to −$200 million in Cobb County, Georgia). We find that the reported fiscal surpluses derive from chosen assumptions and not the stadiums’ complementary developments. We conclude that pro forma estimates do not provide credible forecasts of fiscal impacts, and ancillary developments do not improve the fiscal returns of stadium projects.

Though researchers have demonstrated conclusively that sports stadiums are not economic development catalysts, stadium projects that include pre-planned ancillary developments have been proposed as a salutary strategy to overcome the widely observed dismal economic performance of standalone stadiums. Using an objective rubric for evaluating economic impact studies, we review a commissioned pro forma model that claims to demonstrate net positive fiscal impacts of two prominent publicly-financed stadium-anchored developments. Using reasonable assumptions informed by existing research and established discipline standards, the model estimates substantial negative returns for both projects (-$40 to -$60 million in Worcester, Massachusetts and -$100 to¬ -$200 million in Cobb County, Georgia). We find that the reported fiscal surpluses derive from chosen assumptions and not the stadiums’ complementary developments. We conclude that pro forma estimates do not provide credible forecasts of fiscal impacts, and ancillary developments do not improve the fiscal returns of stadium projects.