| The purpose of this study is to test a thesis that new sports facilities lead to urban development in the cities in which they are built. Siegfried and Zimbalist (2000) hypothesized that a statistically significant positive relationship between sports facility construction and local economic development fails to exist. Their argument is based on the assumption that today's sports facilities are constructed with the goal of maximizing team owners' revenue by promoting the sale of luxury boxes and premium seating, as opposed to maximizing capacity. In order to test validity of their assumption, a pooled cross-sectional time-series model will be employed to estimate the regression parameters for a sample of approximately fifty cities selected from the three hundred largest MSA's to determine the extent to which new sports facility construction in the United States impacts on MSA Personal Income, Retail Trade Sales and Service Employment. In addition, the effect of new sports facilities on the sample cities "quality of life" rating will also be analyzed using multivariate regression analysis. |
