Advanced Topics in Economics: Sports Economics (EC 390)

Professor Aju Fenn

Students apply theory to various aspects of professional and collegiate sports, considering topics such as wage discrimination, economics of stadiums, alumni giving, academics, broadcasting, and gambling.

Type:  Group project

            Oral presentation

            Web site

Level:  300

Block Plan Context:

Important Features of the Assignment:

• This assignment asks students to utilize a variety of information sources, including popular news, statistics, and scholarly articles.
• The ultimate product is a website, which allows for artistic creativity as well as technological abilities.
• The websites presented in class in three stages, allowing the professor to monitor progress throughout the block.
• This assignment utilizes both writing and quantitative skills.
• Because this is a group assignment, students are forced to work together, pooling their skills in an effort to create a website that is better than anything any one of them could have done alone.

Description of Assignment:

Students create a website on one of the following topics:

1. The economic impact of a sports team on the local economy.

This topic includes public vs. private financing of sports stadiums; the direct and indirect benefits of franchises on economic growth.

2. Competitive balance in sports.

This topic includes the impact of competitive balance on the “financial health” of the sport; factors that affect competitive balance.

3. Discrimination in sports.

This topic includes employer discrimination in hiring and playing minority athletes; coaches and consumer discrimination in attendance and in the market for sports memorabilia.

4. Collegiate sports.

This topic includes any economic issues pertaining to NCAA sports. These issues may range from the connection between winning athletic programs and alumni contributions to the impact of athletics on academics.

5. Attendance in sports.

This topic will focus on the demand analysis of all types of sports ranging from attendance at sporting events to the demand for recreational fishing.

The website will contain three sections:

1. MOTIVATION: This part of the website will explain why it is important to study the topic. It will motivate the need to study the topic by summarizing news items from the popular press (NY Times, Washington Post, CNN, Sports Illustrated, etc.). You will also create links to the stories. All sources must be properly cited.

2. DATA & STATS: This section will contain all data that pertains to the topic that you are studying. You will create downloadable excel files with descriptions attached to each file. You may also use this data to display information graphically and in tabular form on your website. All data sources must be properly cited.

3. JOURNAL ARTICLE ABSTRACTS: This section will contain the names and sources of journal articles that you find on the subject. Each article will have a brief summary below it that contains the findings of the article, the model used and the sources of data. You will follow the citation style from the Journal of Sports Economics.

GRADING: The website will be evaluated during three classroom presentations. The expectation for each presentation are as follows:

PRESENTATION #1 (10%): Sections one and two should be up and running with some content (3-4 news stories, 2 or more data tables). Section three will contain at least two articles (possibly from on-line sources) with abstracts.

PRESENTATION #2 (10%): Sections one and two should show considerable development over presentation 1 (6-8 news stories, 5 or more tables). Section three will contain at least ten new articles with abstracts.

PRESENTATION #3 (10%): All sections should now be complete, showing considerable development over presentation 2. If I am able to do a web search in Google and find data that you do not have, section two will be considered incomplete. Section three will include at least ten new articles with abstracts. If you run out of articles and I am able to find some that you do not have, section three will be considered incomplete. The entire website is due on a zip disk at the beginning of this presentation.

Timeline: