Reply to Zimbalist : 'Report on the Fiscal Impact of Truist Park and the Battery'
Economist Andrew Zimbalist (2022) recently released a report commissioned by the Atlanta Braves on the fiscal impact of Truist Park and The Battery Atlanta, which is highly critical of my report (Bradbury 2022c) that finds the stadium had a negative fiscal impact on Cobb County. In this reply, I respond to Zimbalist's criticism of my work and examine his alternate estimates.Zimbalist's review of my research is not sound. In several places, he accuses me of not providing information that I explicitly include. He appears to be unfamiliar with recent research on the economic impacts of stadiums. He incorrectly criticizes me for not counting special district tax revenue collected almost entirely from pre-existing non-stadium sources as stadium-derived revenue. He dismisses the well-documented novelty effect based on a few cherry-picked observations of ballpark attendance and team payroll.His contrary estimates derive from a speculative forecasting model that he developed for this exercise, which has not been vetted through standard academic peer review and is inconsistent with established economics research methods. I demonstrate that his model is highly sensitive to the chosen sanguine assumptions---excessive revenue growth expectations, insufficient crowding out, and an abnormally-low discount rate---which skew in the direction of producing large fiscal impact estimates.Overall, Andrew Zimbalist's review of my retrospective analysis is deficient to the point of negligence, and his estimates based on dubious projections are not credible. By producing a commissioned report that employs methods and assumptions that are not supported by consensus academic research findings Zimbalist has violated the standard protocols of scholarly discourse. I call on Zimbalist to retract his report
Year of publication: |
2022
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Authors: | Bradbury, John Charles |
Publisher: |
[S.l.] : SSRN |
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