The IOC’s midas touch: Summer Olympics and city growth

Volker Nitsch and Nicolai Wendland

Urban Studies, 2017, vol. 54, issue 4, 971-983

Abstract: Hosting a mega-event is a costly activity of short duration. Still, cities frequently compete to become host of all types of events. This paper examines the effect of staging the largest and most important sporting event in the world, the Summer Olympic Games, on the host city. Applying a difference-in-differences methodology, we analyse the population size of Olympic cities, candidate cities and other large cities in host and candidate countries over the period from 1860 to 2010. We find that, following the Games, host cities do not experience a measurable increase in population size relative to cities in the control group. On the contrary, to the extent that any effect of hosting the Games is identifiable, our results indicate that being awarded the Summer Olympics has a negative impact on cities.

Keywords: city size; host city; impact; mega-events (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0042098015623719 (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:urbstu:v:54:y:2017:i:4:p:971-983

DOI: 10.1177/0042098015623719

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Urban Studies from Urban Studies Journal Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().