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...

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...