Brazil has the rare fortune of hosting the world’s two highest-profile sporting events back-to-back: the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics. So too does it find itself in the midst of an historic anti-corruption movement. As recent Olympics have reminded us, mega sporting events can...

We empirically investigate whether there is any statistically and economically meaningful correlation between the success a nation’s soccer team in the FIFA World Cup Finals and that nation’s real per-capita GDP growth. Using an unbalanced panel of countries from 1950 through 2004, we find...

Indictments of top FIFA officials by the Department of Justice and ongoing investigations into corruption in the World Cup bidding process have intensified speculation about whether FIFA will strip the 2022 World Cup from the host Qatar Football Association (“QFA”) and instead award it to...

An extensive literature mostly developed after the Barcelona Olympic Games has questioned the existence of net economic benefits arising from the organization (with significant amounts of public resources) of major sporting events such as the Olympics, although some studies still defend their...

There is considerable ambiguity about what makes an event a mega-event. Intervening in this debate, this paper develops a definition and classification scheme for mega-events. On the basis of a review of existing definitions, it proposes four constitutive dimensions of mega-events: visitor...

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...

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...

One of the most important impacts of the 2006 football World Cup in Germany was the "feel-good effect". This contribution analyzes the management of such an effect. Appropriate basic organizational and infrastructure conditions in the realms of security, transport, and ecology are of key...

The process used to select the hosts of the Olympic Games is under increased scrutiny due to the withdrawal of many cities from the 2022 Winter Olympic Games host selection process, and the selection of hosts with questionable human rights records. Scholarship, particularly legal scholarship,...

This article examines the duties and responsibilities owed by persons involved with organising and staging major sporting events under Australian workplace health and safety (WHS) laws. While WHS laws focus primarily on the health and safety of workers, they also have a very broad public safety...