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Sports, Jobs, and Taxes: The Economic Impact of Sports Teams and Stadiums

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Andrew Zimbalist is back with his newest book on the economics of sports, Sports, Jobs, and Taxes. After writing Baseball to Billions, the Smith College professor returns with this publication on the effects of building stadiums in major markets. Zimbalist co-edits the book with Roger G. Noll, a director of the Public Policy Program at Stanford University. The two men examine many different cities and their various plans that involved new sports facilities. Using a dizzying assault of numbers and statistics, Sports, Jobs, and Taxes proves case by case how employment, taxes and urban development were either unaffected or negatively influenced by the facilities built in the respective cities. While such examples as Minneapolis, Chicago, and Cincinnati display evidence to support the editors' theories, the repetitiveness of these chapters' points begin to wear on the reader. Still, one comes away fully understanding what is continually stressed by Zimbalist and Noll. Sports facilities and the teams that play in them do not enhance local economies, do little for job creation, and never make up for the cost of higher taxes.

I used this as the backbone of my senior paper in college. However, I found that the authors did quite a bit of stretching to say that "no impact could be found". My own research has concluded that stadia can not be evaluated in purely economic terms as they chose to do.

That said, this book is good for grounding readers in a number of case studies, and should provide a road map to stadium advocates as to the flaws in previous proposals.