II cast my first vote at age 18 in 1997, voting “yes” on a proposal to spend government money on a stadium for Major League Soccer’s Columbus Crew. I did not know it then, but economists were in pretty much universal agreement that stadiums are poor public “investments.”

That consensus has only strengthened over time, as demonstrated in The Economic Impact of Sports Facilities, Franchises, and Events. The book contains 16 essays in honor of stadium economics pioneer Robert Baade of Lake Forest College. Economists argue a lot, but as John Charles Bradbury puts it in his contribution, “There are few topics on which there is more agreement among economists than the economic impact of sports stadiums.” The science is settled, to coin a phrase: even when economists do find evidence that stadiums, franchises, and mega-events generate local tax revenue, create jobs, or make cities better places to live, the effects are much, much smaller than what boosters claim based on sophisticated sounding but fundamentally flawed economic impact studies. Bradbury explains the “Baade Rule”: “If you want to know what the true economic impact of an event is, take whatever number is being claimed by the boosters and move the decimal point one place to the left.”

Baade got this research rolling in the 1980s. As the book’s contributors explain, his tentative conclusion that stadium spending does not translate into economic growth has withstood almost four decades of reexamination and refinement with better data and empirical techniques. The chapters address and measure things like the modest contributions big-time college football games make to sales tax revenue, people’s willingness to pay to maintain NFL rivalries, the contributions of “micro-events” like regional bike races, the effects of the 2016 Democratic and Republican Conventions, how taxes changed when the Dallas Cowboys moved from Irving to Arlington, TX, how franchises affect property values, how the St. Louis Rams’ move to Los Angeles affected the St. Louis region, the effect of stadium construction on construction employment in the Twin Cities, how on-campus stadiums affect college football attendance, and prospects for future comparative work between North America and Europe.

The book closes with a short essay on stadium financing by one of the editors, Victor A. Matheson, that will make readers sigh when they put the book down. He writes, “Stadium subsidies are a perfect example of ‘zombie economics,’ or bad ideas that just will not die.” He cites recent deals that remind me of H.L. Mencken’s quip that “democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” Pointing to last year’s agreement that Buffalo, NY, taxpayers will provide $850 million for a new football stadium, Matheson writes, “When economists suggested it was hard to imagine a worse stadium deal than the one in Buffalo, Nashville said, ‘Hold my beer,’ and proposed a $2.1 billion stadium with $1.26 billion in public money which was later approved.”

Happy but not rich / If stadium subsidies are such terrible ideas, then why do they remain so popular? One reason is good old-fashioned rent-seeking in a world where there are concentrated benefits and dispersed costs: construction companies looking at millions of dollars in contracts and news outlets needing content have a stronger incentive to lobby for a stadium than someone who might be annoyed at having to pay somewhat higher taxes or navigate gameday traffic. Even then, a lot of people made worse off financially still believe that a new stadium will bring in big bucks.

In her contribution to the volume, titled “The Unshakeable Belief in the Economic Impact of Sports,” Nola Agha offers a few plausible reasons. First, people conflate direct and conspicuous spending with “economic impact,” even though these are mostly highly visible reshufflings. The steel and concrete used to build the stadium aren’t used to fix a bridge, and all the flashy visible activity happening at and due to the event might displace harder-to-see mundane activity. She notes that Super Bowl L led to a decrease in sales at San Francisco’s Pier 39.

When Birmingham, AL, hosted the World Games in the summer of 2022, the hair salon I used announced it would close-up shop during the games because of parking and other problems. One small business owner I talked to expressed frustration that they had been sold a big vision of swarming customers but that it looked like everyone was going to the food trucks brought into the park that hosted one of the events.

People familiar with the economics of stadiums will find a lot of additional evidence for what they already know. It is hard to statistically identify the effects of stadiums and mega-events because, as the essays point out, they suffer from needle-in-a-haystack problems. As impressive as a horde of tens of thousands of fans might be on gameday, any facility or team will account for a very small part of an area’s economic activity. Even when scholars can cut through the noise and identify the relevant effects, they are often paltry compared to what boosters promised. Geoffrey Propheter and Shihao Dai found that the Dallas Cowboys’ move from Irving to Arlington increased tax collections in both places. However, the change barely accounted for rounding errors in municipal budgets. Moreover, the fact that Irving tax collections rose, they argue, is at least some evidence that sports and mega-events crowd out other local activities. Displacement effects get some additional support from Brad R. Humphreys’s study of the St. Louis metro area after the Rams moved back to Los Angeles.

We learn in the volume that Baade’s go-to line when reporters ask about the effects of stadiums and mega-events is, “These events might make us happy, but there isn’t much evidence that they make us rich.” The essays in this volume strengthen his argument. Teams and events are a lot of fun, but city leaders looking to make their citizens healthier, wealthier, and wiser would have about as much success depending on Santa Claus to deliver those benefits as they would a new stadium.

I have known for a long time that I voted unwisely in 1997. I was an ignorant high school kid, and the economic research on stadium subsidies wasn’t as well-developed. Middle-aged men and women looking to lead their cities in the mid-2020s don’t have those excuses. But there is no need to be morose. Channeling Ronald Coase (as the authors do), if the essays in this volume mean that just one city says “no” to a team looking for a nine-figure handout, their authors will have earned their salaries many times over.