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National Wellbeing and International Sports Events

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Author Info
Georgios Kavetsos () (Tanaka Business School, Imperial College)
Stefan Szymanski () (Cass Business School, City University, London)

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Abstract

The widely proclaimed economic benefits of hosting major sporting events have received substantial criticism by academic economists and have been shown to be negligible, at best. The aim of this paper is to formally examine the existence of another potential impact: national wellbeing or the so-called “feelgood” factor. Using data on self-reported life satisfaction (happiness) for twelve European countries we test for the impact of hosting and of national athletic success on happiness. Our data covers three different major events: the Olympic Games, the FIFA World Cup and the UEFA European Championship. We find that the “feelgood” factor associated with hosting football events is large and significant, but that the impact of national athletic success on happiness, while correctly signed, is statistically insignificant.

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File URL: http://www.holycross.edu/departments/economics/RePEc/spe/SzymanskiKavetsos_WellBeing.pdf
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Publisher Info
Paper provided by International Association of Sports Economists in its series Working Papers with number 0804.

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Length: 31 pages
Date of creation: Aug 2008
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:spe:wpaper:0804

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Web page: http://www.cdes.fr/index.php?id=fr69
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Related research
Keywords: Life satisfaction; Happiness; Feel-good factor; Sporting events; Economic impact;

Other versions of this item:

Find related papers by JEL classification:
D60 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - General
I31 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare and Poverty - - - General Welfare
L83 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Sports; Gambling; Recreation; Tourism

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