The Impact of Professional Sports on Cities’ Economic Performance

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the impact of professional sports on cities’ economic performance as measured by real per capita income growth and changes in the unemployment rate. We use a panel model across 43 cities over eight years. Explanatory variables include the number of professional sports franchises in a city and the performance of those franchises. We find no statistically significant evidence suggesting that professional sports franchises impact cities’ real per capita income growth. We do, however, find that professional sports franchises have a statistically significant impact on unemployment rates