Professional Sporting Events and Firm-Level Economic Activity
26 Pages Posted: 7 Oct 2016
Date Written: October 2016
Abstract
This paper investigates the impact of professional sporting events on the daily revenue of a particular restaurant in Charlotte, NC. The daily data allow us to test for the impact of professional basketball and professional football games on daily revenues. For this particular firm, professional football games are associated with a net increase in daily revenues, regardless of game outcome; professional basketball games are not associated with increases in daily revenues. Using betting markets as a proxy for market expectations of game outcomes, the data suggest that NFL fans in Charlotte spend more after NFL home games regardless of outcome and regardless of expectations but that they spend less after unexpected losses on the road. This suggests that NFL fans reflect celebratory effects of home games and sore-loser effects of unexpected losses. In contrast, NBA fans reflect only sore-loser effects after unexpected losses at home. The mixed impacts of game outcomes on firm-level revenue suggest that mixed results using aggregate data might be partly caused by the outcomes of events.
Keywords: sports, economic impacts, sports subsidies, tourism
JEL Classification: L83, Z20
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation