Olympic Games: No legacy?

Countries whose cities host the Summer Olympic Games increase significantly their success during the competition. We study whether such effect is lasting or not. We compute the effect of hosting on the total number of medals in the subsequent games. To confront the issue that the selection of the host city is endogenous, we use a natural counterfactual: countries whose cities also bid for the Olympics but were not selected by the International Olympic Committee. In all cases, we find that Olympic success on medals fades away immediately after hosting.

That is from this paper by Jose L. Contrerasa & Alejandro Corvalanb. (Economic Letters,  February 2014).

There is also evidence that ". . . countries hosting mega-events tend to over-estimate the benefits and under-estimate the costs" as indicated by financial returns of companies involved in Olympic Games - and that evidence is from Beijing. 

Research Tribune (sport economics, gerontocracy)

 . . . celebrity endorsements are value enhancing events and damage to celebrity’s image has detrimental effects on company’s value. On the other hand, lack of robustness of this paper’s findings may suggest that the old adage “any publicity is good publicity” still holds true (Bartz, Molchanov, & Stork, December 2012).

. . . the older is the ruling class [in a country] the lower is the public investment in education and productive services (Atella & Carbonari, February 2013).

Economics of Crime: The Effect of Additional Police Force on Crime Rate, Evidence from Basketball

Hiroya Kawashima uses an interesting approach:

This paper analyzes influence of an additional referee on number of fouls by using the data from Women's Japan Basketball League (WJBL) in order to examine whether number of police officers affects the crime rate. For the season of 2010-2011, the upper league of the WJBL introduced 3 referees system for the adaption of the international standard. Using this natural experiment, the Difference in Difference and the Instrumental Variable method are used to remove endogeneity. The results indicate that increased number of referees decrease number of fouls after considering both reverse causality and unobservable heterogeneity.

The paper is titled "The Effect of Additional Police Force on Crime Rate: Evidence from Women's Japan Basketball League." It is here. 

You can read more on this topic here (Ross Douthat, h/t: Alex Tabarrok), and here (Bryan Caplan).

H/t: Clarence Nkengne Tsimpo.

The economics of endorsing sports celebrities

. . . [W]e find there is a positive pay-off to a firm’s decision to sign an endorser, and that endorsements are associated with increasing sales in an absolute sense and relative to competing brands. Furthermore, sales and stock returns jump noticeably with each major achievement by the athlete. However, whereas stock-return effects are relatively constant, sales effects exhibit decreasing returns over time. We outline implications for practitioners.

That is from a paper by Elberse and Verleun (July 2011), "The Economic Value of Celebrity Endorsements."