Toward Determining Minimal/Optimal Transportation Department Resource Requirements: An Examination of State Privatization Trends among Selected States

The purpose of this project was to conduct a preliminary analysis of employment and privatization trends in state transportation departments. This project involved a review of recent literature on public sector privatization efforts, an analysis of all state transportation departments in order to locate a sample of states with transportation system characteristics similar to those of Kentucky, and a survey of the sample states· to determine privatization trends in the functional areas of administration, maintenance, design, engineering, enforcement and safety, and construction. The study finds that among transportation departments in the 14 sample states, average annual increases in private sector service contracts and expenditures out-paces increase in state expenditures for transportation functional·areas and FTE\u27s tenfold. In addition, while significant privatization activities were found in each functional area, privatization activities were most evident in the functional areas of maintenance and design

The Importance of Import Substitution in Marathon Economic Impact Analysis

Marathon running has experienced considerable growth in recent years, fueled both by an increase in participation rates and by a corresponding increase in the number marathons staged each year. Because marathons have a presumed economicbenefit, there also has been growth in the number of marathon-related economic impact studies. However, these studies calculate incorrectly, or omit altogether, an important source of impact: the impact generated when local runners use their home-city marathon as a substitute for participating in an alternative marathon out-of-town. Given that this pattern of behavior is common among marathon runners and the fact that local runners constitute a significant percentage of race participants in most marathons, errors in the treatment of locally based impact is an important problem that must be addressed. This study focuses on the proper way to account for locally sourced impact in marathon analysis, and presents a study of the 2006 Cincinnati Flying Pig Marathon to illustrate this methodology

Shipping the Runners to the Race: A Sport Tourism Interpretation of the Alchian-Allen Theorem

This paper provides empirical support for the Alchian and Allen shipping the good apples out hypothesis. The hypothesis version tested here involves estimating the effect of travel cost on the quality of a weekend trip to Cincinnati, where travel cost is measured by time spent in travel and visit quality is measured by the amount of discretionary spending associated with the trip. Using linear regression analysis on data from race participants in the 2008 Flying Pig marathon and half marathon races, strong and robust evidence is found to support the validity of this hypothesis. Specifically, travel distance does indeed have a statistically significant positive but diminishing (with distance traveled) impact on discretionary spending for both marathon and half-marathon participants. The results provide support for this proposition, a variant of the shipping the good apples out hypothesis, and add empirical support to the diverse but relatively limited literature on this subject. ABSTRACT FROM AUTHO

On-Line and Telephone Surveys: The Impact of Survey Mode on Spending Estimates by Participants in a Major Urban Marathon

Survey research has always been an important tool for those interested in the study of sport. Recent advances in technology have made on-line survey administration particularly attractive compared to traditional data gathering methods. This study presents research undertaken as part of an economic impact analysis of the 2002 Flying Pig Marathon in Cincinnati, Ohio, and tests for significant differences in reported spending between data gathered via a telephone survey and data gathered via on-line survey. Tests indicated that while the two survey methods produced largely similar results, significant differences were found in some spending categories. The analysis concluded that group-size bias in the telephone survey was the main source of reported spending difference. After adjusting for this bias, the on-line approach is at least as effective as the telephone approach when there is strong evidence that the population of interest utilizes e-mail