National Wellbeing and International Sports Events

Georgios Kavetsos and Stefan Szymanski

No 804, Working Papers from International Association of Sports Economists, North American Association of Sports Economists

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.

Keywords: Life satisfaction; Happiness; Feel-good factor; Sporting events; Economic impact (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D60 I31 L83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2008-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap and nep-spo
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://web.holycross.edu/RePEc/spe/SzymanskiKavetsos_WellBeing.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://web.holycross.edu/RePEc/spe/SzymanskiKavetsos_WellBeing.pdf [302 Found]--> https://web.holycross.edu/RePEc/spe/SzymanskiKavetsos_WellBeing.pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: National well-being and international sports events (2010)
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:spe:wpaper:0804

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from International Association of Sports Economists Contact information at EDIRC., North American Association of Sports Economists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Victor Matheson ().