The Effects of Marijuana Legalization on NCAA Men's Basketball Recruiting

Brent A. Evans, Christopher Clark and Joshua D. Pitts

Journal of Sports Economics, 2024, vol. 25, issue 2, 200-216

Abstract: Over the past two decades, attitudes toward marijuana usage have softened. This shift in sentiment coincided with reduced punishments, decriminalization, and in some states, legalization. We find evidence of unexpected consequences of marijuana legalization. Using difference-in-difference estimation, we show that legalization correlates with recruiting outcomes in NCAA D1 sports. Specifically, legalization appears to improve basketball recruiting outcomes for in-state colleges but hurts recruiting outcomes for football programs. Since collegiate athletics are directly correlated with revenues and may affect the number of general applications that a university receives, our results reveal a channel through which marijuana laws could impact post-secondary education.

Keywords: Marijuana; college basketball; college football; NCAA; recruiting; sports economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 J20 Z20 Z21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/15270025231217975 (text/html)

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:sae:jospec:v:25:y:2024:i:2:p:200-216

DOI: 10.1177/15270025231217975

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Sports Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().