Eva Marikova Leeds

A stadium by any other name: the value of naming rights.

Since the 1990s, an increasing number of professional sports teams have sold the naming rights for their facilities to private firms. Although some policy makers have protested the private sectors appropriation of naming rights, no one has questioned the value of this strategy to the firms that buy the naming rights. The authors use a one-step version of event analysis to show that naming rights do not have a lasting impact on the profitability of the firms that buy them.

Gold, Silver, and Bronze: Determining National Success in Men’s and Women’s Summer Olympic Events

Summary We add to the literature on Olympic performance by explicitly studying the determinants of women’s performance at the Games.We estimate separate models of medal production for men and women over the last four Summer Olympic Games. The production of medals is a function of capital, labor, and total factor productivity (TFP). We use real GDP per capita and population - two variables that appear in almost all Olympic studies - as proxies for capital and labor. Our measure of TFP is a vector of variables that captures a nation’s willingness and ability to marshal its resources to promote Olympic performance and variables that determine its willingness to support its women. Because the dependent variable is a count measure, we estimate the production function using a negative binomial framework. We find that the determinants of success by a nation’s women closely resemble the determinants for its men. We also show that some determinants of gold medal counts differ from the determinants of silver and bronze medals. Our findings suggest that nations can improve the medal performance of men and women by following policies that increase the political and economic participation of women.

Do men and women respond differently to economic contests? The case of men’s and ladies’ figure skating

Women’s sports have received much less attention from economists than from other social scientists. This Handbook fills that gap with a comprehensive economic analysis of women’s sports. It also analyzes how the behavior and treatment of female athletes reflect broad economic forces.

Response to Blair and Haynes

In our recent article (Leeds, Leeds, & Pistolet, 2007), we present evidence that the purchase of naming rights does not add to the profitability of firms that purchase them. Specifically, we find that purchasing naming rights rarely affects the holding period return of the companies’ stock and that, when the abnormal returns are statistically significant, they are just as likely to be negative as they are to be positive. Blair and Haynes (2008, this issue) provide a cogent, well-stated explanation for our finding. They claim that a firm’s purchase of naming rights will inspire its competition to redouble its own marketing efforts. The competing advertising campaigns offset one another, eliminating the additional profits that the naming rights bring. Investors anticipate this chain of events and find the company’s stock no more attractive than before it purchased naming rights. As a result, the company does not experience abnormal holding returns. Blair and Haynes’s claim does not differ substantially from our own conclusion that ‘‘purchasing naming rights is no more profitable than any other investment’’ (p. 593). Their contribution is to specify a mechanism by which the return to naming rights is driven down until it is no higher than other returns. They are right to ask why there is no return to purchasing naming rights, and their explanation could very well be correct. However, we see two reasons to believe that some other factor lies behind our finding. First, Blair and Haynes base their argument on the fact that the long-run net return to purchasing naming rights is driven to zero by rival advertising campaigns. Rival firms are motivated to stage their own campaigns, however, only if the purchase of naming rights brings short-run returns. These short-run returns could be substantial particularly if rival firms do not have contingency plans in place to counteract the purchase of naming rights or if their campaigns must overcome brand loyalty created by the naming rights. Blair and Haynes must now explain why investors are so focused on long-run returns that they ignore what may be substantial and prolonged short-run returns. Second, there may be a simpler explanation for our finding that naming rights do not affect holding period return: Purchasing naming rights may not be profitable,