Mega-Events: Is the Texas-Baylor game to Waco what the Super Bowl is to Houston?

Abstract

This paper estimates the total sales and sales tax revenue impacts on host communities of a variety of professional and collegiate sporting events. Using 126 jurisdictions from Texas, covering every month from January, 1990 through April of 2006, the analysis finds that regular season games in the NBA, NFL, NHL, and MLB have widely disparate effects. The NBA and NFL regular season games are net losers of revenue, NHL and MLB games generate additional revenue. Collegiate regular season football games are revenue generators for small cities and towns home to D-I and D-IAA football, but cities that are home to teams from the old Southwest Conference or the new Big 12 conference do not gain revenues from home contests. The Super Bowl generated over $2 million in tax revenues for Houston, by far the largest revenue boost of any of the events in our data.tourism, economic impacts, special events