Impacts of Mega Sporting Events: Does the Moderate View Still Apply?

The “Baade consensus,” i.e., the non-significance of staging major sporting or of the construction of new sports stadiums for employment, income, or tax revenues, was valid for some two or three decades. Some recent publications question the consensus. This contribution finds that these newer studies suffer from problematic modeling of the development trends that would have arisen without the event, from potential sample selection biases, and from potential variable selection biases. Furthermore, it is notable that most of the booster publications use highly aggregated data such as national GDP or national exports (often on a yearly basis), whereas the previous work from the Baade consensus used increasingly disaggregated datasets. Also, booster estimates imply multipliers which seem much too large compared to empirical results in other areas. The contribution also indicates that the studies on the effects of mega sports events may be a case of “retire statistical significance” as the power of the tests may be too low to uncover or exclude significant and economically plausible effects with a reasonable probability.