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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)

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://college.holycross.edu/RePEc/spe/SzymanskiKavetsos_WellBeing.pdf
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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by International Association of Sports Economists & North American 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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Related research

Keywords: Life satisfaction; Happiness; Feel-good factor; Sporting events; Economic impact;

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References

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Citations

Blog mentions

As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
  1. Governments, sport and happiness
    by Richard Green in Club Troppo on 2010-11-22 05:21:02
  2. New Zealand's Olympic success - what's in it for us?
    by Sam Richardson in Fair Play and Forward Passes on 2012-08-13 00:14:00
Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
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Cited by:
  1. Georgios Kavetsos, 2012. "National Pride: War Minus the Shooting," Social Indicators Research, Springer, vol. 106(1), pages 173-185, March.
  2. Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt & Georgios Kavetsos, 2011. "Form or Function? The Impact of New Football Stadia on Property Prices in London," SERC Discussion Papers 0087, Spatial Economics Research Centre, LSE.
  3. Gabriel Ahlfeldt & Wolfgang Maennig & Michaela Ölschläger, 2009. "Lifestyles and Preferences for (Public) Goods: Professional Football in Munich," Working Papers 030, Chair for Economic Policy, University of Hamburg.
  4. Robert Gasquez & Vicente Royuela, 2012. "Is football an indicator of development at the international level?," Working Papers in Economics 275, Universitat de Barcelona. Espai de Recerca en Economia.

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