Sports and Human Capital

Mark Rosentraub, author of  Major League Losers: The Real Cost Of Sports And Who's Paying For It has changed his tune a bit lately.  Yesterday at the Sports and Society Conference being held in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Rosentraub gave a talk "How (and why) Cities Needs Sports and Culture for Economic Development."  Here is the abstract of the talk: Cities and civilizations have built sports and cultural facilities and used sporting events to attract people to cities across several millennia.  Why?  This paper argues that the answer is to be found in the role these institution, facilities, and events assume […]

March Madness: O Canada Version

The second round game between Syracuse and Gonzaga today has an interesting sub-plot:  a lot of Canadians will be on the floor.  Syracuse guard Andy Rautins and forward Kris Joseph are Canadian citizens; Gonzaga has four Canadians on the roster.  In Canada, sports channel The Score has the broadcast rights to the Big Dance, and they have naturally been promoting teams with Canadian players heavily. They also do a lot of old school, ESPN-style switching between games to show close finishes. Dave Berri and a slew of coauthors have investigated the effect of the globalization of sport on competitive balance […]

More Big 10 Expansion Talk - Does Basketball Matter?

Following up on Brad's post about Big 10 expansion plans, it looks like the football coaches in the Big XII have no idea what's going on in Expando World.  At the least, they're not tipping their hands.  From Dave Matter at the Columbia Daily Tribune: Conference realignment is the biggest offseason plot line in college football. Coaches in the Big 12 are as curious as everyone else following the headlines — and fumbling in the dark for answers. Matter goes on to mention some of the candidates being bandied about, including everybody's favorite Notre Dame plus one that I mentioned […]

Sweet Lew's Sweet Compensation Package

Major college athletic programs are run in ways that are very similar their professional brethren. They compete in markets for top talent (except that in college, the players can't be paid). They practice price discrimination. For example, colleges routinely give ticket discounts to students, an example of what we economists call third-degree price discrimination. They use two-part tariffs to allocate tickets. In the pros, they use personal seat licenses. In college, they use donations. Both the pros and the colleges employ revenue sharing. The primary difference between the colleges and the pros is that the revenue programs in college, generally […]

NCAA Men's Basketball Postseason Roundup

March Madness is upon us again.  This year, the men's college basketball postseason features some interesting economic madness across the board.  For the second year in a row, there are four postseason tournaments. Here's a roundup of the four events: The NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Championship. The "Big Dance."  65 teams in a single elimination "knockout" tournament spread over three weekends in March and April.  Games are held at predetermined neutral sites across the country.  The big economic news here is that this could be the last year of the much-loved 65 team format, which has been in place […]

Financial Problems at UC Berkeley

And it has nothing to do with the sorry state of the State Budget.  I got an interesting cold call yesterday from a faculty member at UC Berkeley.  He is a member of a task force examining the financial crisis in the Cal Athletic Department.  According to an article in the Daily Californian, the athletic department was subsidized by the university to the tune of $13.7 million dollars last year, including a $5.8 million dollar "loan" from the "former vice chancellor of administration."  I can guess where the "former" came from.  Based on the article, things got rather heated at […]

Should the NCAA Expand Its Men's Tourney?

The NCAA is considering expanding its men's basketball tournament from 65 to 96 teams. According to Joe Walljasper, the last time the tournament expanded was in response to the creation of the Mountain West Conference. When the MWC was created, that essentially created another automatic qualifier to the tourney, simultaneously taking away an at-large bid if the NCAA stood pat. The NCAA didn't stand pat. Instead, it created a play-in game whose winner gets the honor of being squished by the top dog in the tourney. One of the tradeoffs the NCAA needs to consider is the simultaneous increase and […]

Why Are Economic Models so Complex?

We sports economists have become accustomed to inflated economic impact statements made in documents used to support subsidies for sports. Economists Craig Depken and J. C. Bradbury have recent posts on their blogs about this issue. First, in a post over at Division of Labour, Craig posts an excerpt from a Miami Herald article on the economic impact of Super Bowls in Miami. Advocates of the Super Bowl as an economic engine dismiss its academic skeptics as using complicated formulas to obscure the obvious. And they note that the reports bashing NFL figures bring the professors coveted media coverage as […]

No More Super Bowls in Miami?

A story in today's Boston Herald reports that posted prices for Super Bowl tickets range from $2,000 to $5,000 in the secondary market.

Report: Lower Ticket Prices for Women's Basketball is Due to Institutional Sexism

From the Chronicle of Higher Ed.: "Colleges charge a premium for admission to see males play, even when women's basketball teams are ranked as among the very best performers in the nation," write the authors, Laura Pappano and Allison J. Tracy, both of the Wellesley Centers for Women. By charging less for admission to highly ranked women's games, the authors say, athletics departments engage in "institutional discrimination that is camouflaged as sensible economic practice." The report analyzed ticket prices at every level, from single-game to season tickets, at 292 Division I colleges. The results showed that ticket prices for women's […]

UEFA's Definition of "Fair Play"

ESPN Soccernet recently reported UEFA's passage of a new "financial fair play" standard to go in effect in 2013. Stefan Symanski raised the alert back in 2006 and wondered about enforceability -- a topic I'll leave to him. In Eurocrat-speak, "fair play" means that a club cannot spend more on transfers or wages than their earn in soccer-related revenue defined as money received only from ticket sales, sponsorship, merchandise and television income. It would not include any financial investment by owners or major shareholders. UEFA President Michael Platini explained "We don't want to kill or hurt the clubs, on the […]

More March Madness!

Remember the good old days when there were only two postseason men's college basketball tournaments? Things were simple then. If your bubble popped, you either landed in the postseason NIT, or you went home, licked your wounds and dreamed of next year. Things got a bit messier last year, with the debut of the College Basketball Invitational (CBI), a 16 team tournament sponsored by a sports marketing company that tried to steal a few teams from the NIT. I had a post about the CBI last year. The CBI is back again this year, although the games will be televised […]