Pigskin, Tailgating and Pollution: Estimating the Environmental Impacts of Sporting Events

This paper estimates the environmental impact of sporting events by analyzing a collection of small typically geographically isolated cities which host at least one NCAA football team that competes in the Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) in 2010. Fixed-effects regressions controlling for differences across cities and across months suggest that cities do experience an increase in pollution levels on and around game days relative to non-game days. These marginal increases were largest in November even after controlling for weather, various trends and other sources of seasonality. When hosting games in November, the corresponding percent increases in daily mortality ranged from .06 to .25% for cardiovascular mortality to .23 to .47% for respiratory mortality.