Brian M. Mills

League‐Level Attendance and Outcome Uncertainty in U.S. Pro Sports Leagues

We extend the breakpoint literature regarding annual league‐level attendance and the impact of outcome uncertainty to the National Basketball Association, National Football League, and National Hockey League. As our measures are different than past work on baseball, we also apply our model to the American and National Leagues. Attendance series for each league under consideration are not stationary overall, but are stationary with break points. No form of outcome uncertainty (game, play‐off, or across seasons) matters for attendance in hockey or baseball regardless of which game uncertainty variable is used. Under the measure of game uncertainty that recommends itself for football, only play‐off uncertainty matters for attendance. Whether outcome uncertainty matters for basketball depends on the measure of game uncertainty. Situational similarities in the break points across leagues suggest general areas for future research.

Further Examination of Potential Discrimination Among MLB Umpires

We address potential racial bias by Major League Baseball umpires with respect to ball–strike calls. We offer a number of econometric specifications to test the robustness of the results, adding the role of implicit and explicit monitoring as well as pitch location. Our analysis shows mixed results regarding the matching of umpire and pitcher race. We conclude that evidence of own-race bias is sensitive to specification and methodology. How results can differ based on different data sets, specifications, time periods, and race classifications are discussed.

Historical Time Series Perspectives on Competitive Balance in NCAA Division I Basketball

In this article, we extend the literature on competitive balance to National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I men’s basketball. We track historical within-conference balance utilizing measures accounting for game-level uncertainty and consecutive season uncertainty. We find a host of structural changes in competitive balance across the sport that align closely with the GI Bill, racial integration, and the split of the NCAA into three divisions. We also find evidence of short-term improvements in balance following individual conference-level regulation specific to the Ivy League.

The National Hockey League and cross-border fandom: fan substitution and international boundaries.

This article uses daily border-crossing data within the Niagara region of Ontario and New York to evaluate the Canadian market for a U.S.-based National Hockey League (NHL) team, the Buffalo Sabres. We conservatively estimate that 15% of attendees at Buffalo Sabres home games travel from Canada. This effect is heterogeneous with respect to the opponent country of origin, with higher levels of game day border crossing associated with a Canadian visiting team. We also find fan substitution effects between Buffalo and the Toronto Maple Leafs with respect to both the price of attendance and the quality of each team. Implications extend to NHL expansion near international borders and compensation to incumbent teams both within and across the national border near where an expansion or relocated team is placed.

Fan substitution between North American professional sports leagues

We use Canada-to-US border crossing data to estimate market penetration and fan substitution across sports leagues. We find that passenger car crossings into the US increase by more than 2000 when the National Football League’s Buffalo Bills are playing a home game just across the border. This accounts for as much as 5% to 8% of Bills home attendance. Additionally, we find evidence of price competition, but not quality competition, between the Bills and Toronto-based teams in the three other major North American pro sports leagues. Given the exclusive market rights and antitrust privilege extended to professional sport in North America, these findings have important implications with respect to competition policies as they apply to major sports leagues.

Market Power, Exclusive Rights, and Substitution Effects in Sports

This articles argues that consumers of professional sports leagues are not always better off with more sellers because market power can be exerted in many ways. In the presence of one governing body, allowing individual firms to sell a product can be more harmful than a monopoly. Some recent antitrust lawsuits dealing with North American sports leagues have focused on collective sales through the league compared with competitive sales through teams. This paper gives examples where it is not clear that team sales are better than league sales. Furthermore, we argue that market power depends largely on fan substitution within and across leagues, including NCAA sports. We give a summary of recent research in the area of fan substitution, and suggest directions for future work on understanding substitutability and impacts on market power of professional and collegiate sports teams.

Team-Level Time Series Analysis in MLB, the NBA, and the NHL: Attendance and Outcome Uncertainty

We extend the attendance break point literature to the team level, addressing structural change and season aggregated outcome uncertainty for franchises in three of the four North American major leagues. We compare the larger variation at the team level with past time series analysis of league-level annual aggregate attendance. We also note that there is at best mixed evidence of outcome uncertainty impacts on team-level attendance. We discuss the implications for these findings with respect to future research that attempts to comprehensively estimate the demand for attendance.

Competition in shared markets and Major League Baseball broadcast viewership

ABSTRACT This work evaluates the cross-quality elasticity of related products in the context of local market Nielsen Local People Meter ratings of Major League Baseball (MLB) regular season broadcasts from 2010 through 2013 from six teams in three shared markets. We employ a fixed effects panel regression with multi-way error clustering, finding that fans exhibit nuanced behaviour related to the absolute quality and relative quality of the two local teams. Our estimates imply quality-related competition for viewership between teams in the face of large disparities in quality. However, when both teams are of high quality, viewership increased beyond what own-team success would predict alone for the competing team. The competitive effects are largely dominated by the spillover effects. These findings point to complementary effects of team success beyond own-team interest, and bring about an important nuance in the literature on market definition, competition and substitution in sport.

Fiscal outcomes and tax impacts from stadium financing strategies in Arlington, Texas

This paper addresses the case of Arlington, Texas and its strategy of using a sales tax increase to fund the construction of its sports stadiums. While Arlington exported a large portion of the tax increase to nearby areas—and increased its monthly sales and use tax collections by nearly

Expert Workers, Performance Standards, and On-the-Job Training: Evaluating Major League Baseball Umpires

1.7 million—the net outcome with respect to economic activity may not justify its use due to relatively large losses in taxable spending within the city. While certain industry sectors may be prime taxation targets due to unique characteristics of a given area, public managers must be aware of the potential to avoid these taxes due to how municipal boundaries are drawn.The financing lessons provided will be applicable to any tax increase implementation for facilities with temporary tenants or any other publicly-funded project, for example the Olympic Games and World Cup.