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...

In this paper we analyze the impact of hosting the FIFA Soccer World Cup on GDP per capita in a worldwide sample of countries using a transparent statistical methodology for data-driven case studies ⿿ the synthetic control method. Using country level annual-data covering all events occurring...