Evaluating Crime as a Negative Externality of Hosting Mega-Events: Econometric Analysis of the 2012 London Summer Olympics

Nicholas Le
Additional contact information
Nicholas Le: West Virginia University, Department of Economics

No 18-01, Working Papers from Department of Economics, West Virginia University

Abstract: Analysis of the benefits and the drawbacks of hosting large-scale sporting events like the Olympics or World Cup frequently ignore the effects of crime due to its relatively small economic impact in comparison to employment and consumption effects. Literature has frequently tied sporting events and tourism to crime, in addition to observing proximity effects on crime during sporting events. This research seeks to confirm both by implementing a difference-in-difference regression that can show whether crime increased during the Olympics, in particular in London boroughs which hosted venues for the Games. Ultimately, the research concludes that crime in London as a whole does increase although it is unable to find statistically significant evidence that crime increased in host boroughs at a magnitude larger than the general increase in crime in the city. Likely reasons we have been unsuccessful in pinpointing the location effects include data limitations (daily data would be superior to monthly data due to the dates during which the event was hosted) and the relatively small geographical size of each host borough, as well as their proximity to one another.

Keywords: sporting events; economics; crime; olympics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 19 pages
Date: 2018-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-spo, nep-tur and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/cgi/viewcontent ... =econ_working-papers (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wvu:wpaper:18-01

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Department of Economics, West Virginia University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Feng Yao ().