The United States employs an ad hoc, unconventional method of regulating sports betting, banning it almost everywhere while granting a monopoly to firms in a single state, Nevada. This approach encourages illegal sports betting markets, ignores negative externalities, and generates welfare...

A large body of research examines determinants of infant health outcomes but little examines geographic variation generated by exogenous economic shocks. Linking birth data from the CDC Natality files to counties building new facilities from 1995-2002, we find that sports facility construction...

Introduction – 1. A Simple model of sports book operation - 2. Data description - 3. Evidence of shading in NBA point spread betting - 4. Discussion and conclusions - References

An empirical examination of the determinants of real per capita income in cities with professional sports teams from 1969 to 1997 shows that postseason appearances are not associated with any change in the level of real per capita income in these cities. However, in the city that is home to the...

Conventional wisdom holds that parity has increased in college football in recent decades due largely to limits on the number of scholarships teams can offer. The authors find that competitive balance has not increased in college football since the end of World War II, and they find mixed...

This article examines the earnings gap between male and female National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) head basketball coaches. Within women's basketball, female head coaches earn base salaries 9% higher than males. Estimates from a human capital earnings model suggest that differences...

Previous research on point spread betting often assumed that bookmakers attract an equal volume of bets on either side of games in order to maximize profits. This paper examines the plausibility of this assumption. Financial simulations based on actual bet volumes on NFL games, point spreads,...

Professional sports teams receive large public subsidies for new facility construction. Empirical research suggests that these subsidies cannot be justified by tangible or intangible economic benefits. We develop a model of bargaining between local governments and teams over subsidies that...

The utility of gambling model posits that consumption benefits lead rational agents to gamble when faced with negative expected financial returns. We analyze the determinants of bet volume and dollars bet on NCAA basketball games from three on-line sports books to test the predictions of this...