International sports will have to strengthen their efforts to exclude persons with morals in conflict with their sports. IOC and FIFA should mirror their top ambitions in athletic and financial areas by similarly leading ambitions to serve human mankind more generally. To encounter critiques...

Public referenda on Olympic bids have drawn considerable interest in the recent past, also because - with few exceptions - the voters decided against the Olympic ambitions of the local governments and/or local bid committees. For example, within the last five years before the finalizing of this...

Economic impact has developed into one of the most cited and used arguments to bid for major events. Ex ante studies on the economic impact, which analyze regional income and employment impacts, are usually required by local chamberlains or regional financing authorities and occasionally are a...

These events promise to improve the urban quality of life and to induce social legacy because of investments in urban infrastructure, transportation, and sporting facilities. Our analysis of the case of Brazil, especially in Rio de Janeiro (host of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games)...

The prospect of hosting the Olympic Games is attractive to many cities around the world. This article examines 147 variables' potential to discriminate successful from unsuccessful Olympic bids. Our stepwise, rank-ordered logistic regression model includes nine determinants supporting the...

This paper investigates whether a nation's contingent value of hosting a mega-event depends on past experience with implied public goods benefits for its residents. Applying data from an ex-ante and ex-post query based on contingent valuation methods, we use the FIFA World Cup 2006 as a natural...

This study demonstrates that the Football World Cup 1974 in Germany was not able to generate any short to long-term employment effects that were significantly different from zero. It is the first work to examine long-term employment effects of Football World Cup tournaments. It is also one of...

This contribution analyzes 132 factors on their potential to discriminate countries bidding for hosting the Olympic Games from non-bidding countries. Our binary, clustered model using generalized estimating equations (GEE) shows that countries recording long-term economic growth and pursuing a...

Recent analyses relate increases in the growth rate of countries to anticipation effects caused by bidding for the Olympic Games, so called news shocks. We argue that these findings should be interpreted cautiously. First, these analyses may suffer from an omitted variable bias because they...

We analyze whether the Olympic Games contribute to a process of democratization in the awarded country, as postulated in the cases of the 2008 and 2014 Olympics, controlling for endogeneity issues that may arise if the decision to award host status by the International Olympic Committee is...