Don’t tell C.C. Elebash, but there is new evidence that baseball stadiums help local economies.
In the June 2013 issue of the Journal of Sports Economics, Nola Agha, Assistant Professor of the Sport Management Program at the University of San Francisco, has published a study that shows that minor league stadiums have a positive impact on local economies.
The study, “The Economic Impact of Stadiums and Teams: The Case of Minor League Baseball,” uses an extensive unique data set to investigate the efficiency of government subsides for minor league baseball teams and stadiums by measuring pecuniary gains in a local economy, according to the abstract.
Specifically, a dynamic panel data model incorporating 238 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) that hosted affiliated or independent minor league teams between 1985 and 2006 shows that AAA teams, A+ teams, AA stadiums, and rookie stadiums are all associated with significant positive effects on the change in local per capita income. The presence of positive effects is strikingly different from decades of nonpositive results at the major league level.
Don’t you love it when facts get in the way of hating on Blue Wahoos and the CMP stadium.