There have been a couple of dozen economists and public policy researchers whose giant shoulders this site has stood on over the years, but none has been more prolific in their combined academic and Twitter output than Kennesaw State University’s J.C. Bradbury. First arriving on the scene via his now sadly defunct Sabernomics blog and 2007 book The Baseball Economist, Bradbury has more recently made waves for his in-depth analysis of the Atlanta Braves stadium deal, his election to the Cobb County Development Commission as a subsidy skeptic, and his adept use of memes.
I spoke to Bradbury via phone recently about the state of economic research into stadium impacts, how sports giveaways compare to film production giveaways, and why elected officials can’t math. This transcript was edited for clarity and to remove all the “ums” and “you knows” that he and I apparently can’t help but insert every few words.
ND: Welcome to another episode of the Field of Schemes interview series. Today’s guest is J.C. Bradbury, who’s an economist at Kennesaw State University, author of the books The Baseball Economist and Hot Stove Economics, a longtime blogger on sports and economics, and, according to his Twitter bio, a “sabermetric heretic.” J.C., it’s great to have you here!
JCB: Hey, Neil, great! Thanks for having me, happy to talk with you.
ND: I’m a longtime fan of your work, and I have never asked you this, I don’t think, which is: What drew you to the whole world of stadium studies in the first place? I know I’ve talked to other economists who’ve said one of the reasons why there have been fewer stadium economic studies recently is because it’s seen as settled ground in a lot of the economics world. And it’s hard to get academic support for doing stuff where everybody’s like, well, you know, we did these studies back in the ‘80s and the ‘90s, why do them again?
JCB: Right, so my original background is actually in public finance economics. I’d always known about the research on the economic impacts of stadiums — actually most of my research I got drawn to doing on the economics of sports wasn’t even on sports stadiums. And yes, I would agree with you that this was pretty much settled.
If you want to go back to the initial work that was done in the 1990s, you have the Brookings Institution putting out this book by Roger Noll and Andrew Zimbalist called Sports, Jobs, & Taxes. It’s a collection of all the research at the time on the subject. This is 1997, and they’re pretty much: This is settled.
Just for context here, I was in graduate school in 1997. So it wasn’t something that I even would be working on, but, like anything, there are a few things that happen. One is life circumstances change, but also science progresses — if you want to think of economics as a science — and I happened to move to the Atlanta area in the mid-2000s right when Gwinnett took the Richmond Braves in from Richmond to open a new stadium for their Triple-A club.
At the time I was doing a lot of work on sports econ, so I had a lot of reporters calling to ask me about this. I just would say, “Hey, here’s what the research shows.” And I would just keep putting it out: The Hawks update their stadium. [The Falcons’] Mercedes-Benz [Stadium] is built. Then, all of a sudden, right down the street from my house, you get Truist Park being built in Atlanta.
So I sort of got thrown into this. And I said, you know, maybe I need to personally do some work on this. And what I actually found when I was doing a lot of this, from an economist perspective, is I couldn’t believe how much research had actually been done, really within the past decade, on the economic impact of sports stadiums. In fact, a majority of the research on the subject has happened in the past 10 years.
So even though we’re talking about it being settled back in around the year 2000, we’ve done a ton more of that. Some of that has to do with just, you know, you update your analysis. But what has also changed is we’ve had a lot of updates in empirical methods. Economists have found new ways to look at things.
When I go back and look at some of the earliest studies that have been done, I go: Jeez, I’m an editor at the Journal of Sports Economics; if I got this study today, I would send it right back to the author and say, well, you need to do something more than this. And that’s not an insult to the author — things I first published I would send back. It’s just, we grow and we figure out new ways of doing stuff. It’s part of the progression.
In fact, I think we’ve actually reached a point where we probably need to update a lot more of our work and improve what we’re doing, just because we can. It’s important particularly for influencing policy, because one of the reasons I got into doing this is I would try and refer journalists or people studying this to comprehensive studies that have been done. They were done in 2008, and that’s old. How can I convince them, “Trust me, all the other stuff is better now”?
So there’s a long-winded answer to your question.
ND: You just did a survey study of other studies with Dennis Coates and Brad Humphreys. Are there particular things you’ve found there that were the biggest advances that you’re seeing in recent years?
JCB: One of the biggest updates is just the quality of the work that’s being done — the empirical methods that are being used. Just recently the Nobel Prize was awarded for what we call the “credibility revolution” in economics and several econometricians who’ve done a lot of work in improving the way we analyze things like causal inference — trying to determine “Did the stadium cause this growth?” and looking at using new methods — that’s sort of the biggest change that we were seeing.
But one of the things that we do in that study is we put it in the context of the different things that economists have studied. So the earliest studies were focused on, “Hey, we put a team in the Washington, D.C. metro area. Let’s see how the Washington, D.C. metro area’s affected, including Virginia and Maryland and Washington, D.C.” And we basically found out there’s not much impact in that, so let’s go a little bit more local: “Hey, what happens in the neighborhood right around the stadium?” and “Hey, aren’t there some positive benefits just from being a major league city?” How can we quantify those?
I’ve found more recently that people don’t seem to be aware that economists have studied that. They still seem to think, oh, you’re looking at these old studies. No! Economists have looked directly at zip codes right around stadiums. It’s pretty neat how intricate and detailed these studies have been. Yes, we actually have done a lot of good survey work of people: How much do you value knowing that Pittsburgh is the home of the Pirates? What is that worth to you in dollar terms? And there’s some neat survey methods to figure this out. Looking at property tax values, looking at how voters vote on things. There’s a rather large literature on this.
So the idea was, let’s put this together in a systematic way to where we can show: Hey, here’s where you can find the research, and here’s what the research says.
ND: What does the latest research show in terms of what value people put on there? I know there was that study probably 20, 25 years ago by that guy in Kentucky whose name I can never remember, about trying to use a way to put a value on [the presence of a sports team], and it came to like $40 million or $60 million or something like that — in, whatever it was, 1995 dollars.
Are we still at the point where people value sports teams, but not to the point where it’s worth the hundreds of millions, or now billions of dollars, that’s being put into it?
JCB: You’re talking about Bruce Johnson and John Whitehead and their contingent valuation method. Victor Matheson, who’s done a lot of work on this at Holy Cross, has a really nice summary of some of these articles that he did a few years ago for the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. He lists some of the CVM studies. You take the list that he does, and you look at the average percentage value of what was spent and the percentage that the community valued it — it was somewhere between 5 and 20% of the subsidy that was given was about how much people valued it.
Here’s one of the things that people will sometimes say: Oh, but we value being a big league city! Okay, well, do you value handing over 100% of your income to the state government to fund that? Well, no, I don’t value it that much. Okay, well, some positive amount. Where’s the cut point? And the cut point is nowhere close to what we’re actually giving the stadiums. If you’re talking about a stadium in which you have $1 billion being spent, perhaps you could justify a positive subsidy of maybe $100 million. I think that’s being very generous — I’m not saying that’s definitely what it is. But that’s nowhere close to $1 billion!
And we just need to acknowledge that, because so many times these debates are about: Let’s just look at one side, you’re not even talking about the big city feeling and civic pride we’re going to get! Well, yeah, I am. We’ve looked at that. That’s not something that economists have ignored.
ND: Yeah, there really seems to a counterargument for everything. If these things don’t have an economic benefit — but you have to take into account civic pride! If you’re talking about showing that it doesn’t benefit an entire city — well, but what about the local development area?
One of the things I was impressed with about your Braves study is that you attacked it from a whole bunch of different directions: In terms of sales tax receipts, in terms of property values. Do you feel like there’s ever a point where the arguments sort of sink in and it starts having an effect? We’re having this conversation right after the state of New York just approved $1 billion for a Bills stadium, so that’s somewhat coloring my question. But do you feel like there are certain arguments that stick in people’s minds better? Or is it more just a matter of making sure we’ve covered all the bases. so that if somebody comes up with a counterargument, you can say, “Well, actually…”
JCB: There are two ways of thinking about this. One is I wanted to make this as comprehensive as possible, so if anyone says, “Well, what about X?”, I can say, well, here’s a response to X, every argument I’ve ever heard. And so there’s that practical matter, and I’m hopeful that people can see that. But at the end of the day, at least someone can say you’ve addressed this and acknowledged it.
But it seems to me that while people may hear me, they’re not listening. And it is quite eye-opening to talk to people — I’m talking about people I’ve talked to throughout my career about this: policymakers, elected officials, business executives. They absolutely do not want to hear that this is a bad idea. And they cling to it in ways that you cannot imagine: This has to be good because I want it to be good.
It’s really another question that I’ve been grappling with, as I like to think of myself as a social scientist, as an economist: Why is it that people seem to cling to these beliefs, in light of all this evidence? Any type of hope that someone has that it matters, they’ll cling to that until it’s gone.
So part of what I did with my study of what Cobb County did in funding the Braves stadium, Truist Park, was to try and say: Okay, I’m going to take every single argument I’ve ever heard and try and address that head-on openly and honestly, and at least put the evidence out there for people to read. And I may not convince people, but no one can say I haven’t tried — no one can say I’m arguing in bad faith. Although some people have, and that’s the only time I get mad, when people accuse me of arguing in bad faith: “Oh, you’re doing this because you’re paid to do this.” That’s the only time I really get upset.
ND: Do you think that the main reason for resistance is that this is such a big part of people’s business model? Whether you’re a sports team owner or you’re some other sort of major business, the idea of getting public subsidies or tax breaks is very much ingrained in the way that companies operate. Is it just that, or is it the feeling that “Oh my goodness, we’re such an important part of this community, we must have a huge economic impact”?
JCB: You know, if you’d asked me about this 10 years ago — why do these subsidies happen and why are people so supportive of them — I would have gone to some old political economy model to explain how policies get passed in favor of particular interests. There’s some sort of concentrated benefits that’s going to, say, team owners. I own the team. If I get hundreds of millions of dollars of subsidies, that all goes to me, so I’m going to spend a lot of time lobbying legislators and local representatives to get funding for this. The costs are dispersed widely across the tax base, so perhaps it’s only costing every taxpayer 20 bucks a year. It’s not worth fighting the fight, and that’s what happens.
But one of the things that I’ve found in doing this is actually going beyond economics and looking at some of the things that political scientists and sociologists have said. There’s two sociologists in the Philadelphia area — I think they’re at two different schools — Kevin Delaney and Rick Eckstein wrote a book almost 20 years ago on the public funding of stadiums. It was case studies, and they were looking at why these were successful. And one of the really interesting things they found was that the people who were driving these stadium subsidy campaigns weren’t actually the team owners at all. It was really what they call local growth coalitions, which are local CEOs, politicians, newspaper publishers, chambers of commerce. It seems that it’s really being pushed, not for these sort of rational political reasons we think are cost-benefit — and I do think that that does happen, I’m not saying that doesn’t happen — but that there’s some sort of social push for stadiums, and stadiums are somehow viewed as positive.
Largely, I’m looking at some ways of trying to understand why people just say, “I’m going to support a stadium because, you know, in the grand scheme of things, I’ve got to support something. I can talk to my neighbor about it, we can talk about sports, let’s just fund this.”
But at least admit that’s what’s going on. Don’t tell me it’s making me rich.
ND: It definitely seems like there’s a bunch of these weird psychological elements involved. People talk about the “edifice complex” with local elected officials, where you like to build something that you can point to and say, “I did that.” Whereas something more abstract, like reducing class sizes or making sure that public transit is operating, is a little bit harder to point to on a skyline.
But it does seem like it’s not just a bunch of billionaire sports owners snookering everyone else. And Delaney and Eckstein did a great job of showing how these growth coalitions tend to work, and how cities that have stronger growth coalitions tend to see stadium deals go through much more quickly.
I was going to ask you, since you’ve had some experience yourself more directly on this since you’ve been on the Cobb County Development Authority the last couple of years, has that given you any more insight into the way some of the sausages are made?
JCB: It was completely eye-opening. It’s kind of like when I was a kid growing up, I understood that my parents paid bills every month and that was a pain. But I didn’t really understand what that really meant until I got older and I had my own bills to pay — I was like, oh, this is a real pain.
When you go and look at the development authority or any type of development subsidy that’s being handed out, you think, “Oh, there’s these meetings and people talk about this and it doesn’t seem anyone’s paying attention.” And then you actually sit in on some of those things and it’s like, oh my gosh, it’s even worse than I thought!
It is really eye-opening to me some of the arguments that get used. I mean, people would just throw out, “Oh, no, this is going to create tons of jobs.” Well, why is that? “Because new businesses are opening up and people are going to spend their money there!” But you do understand that, um, they would have been spending their money on other things? “No, you don’t understand! They’re going to be spending more!”
It’s like Spinal Tap, “these go to 11,” you know, why don’t you just make 10 louder and make that be the highest number? And they just respond back with the same thing.
I’ll give you an example of one of the things that’s happened in the Cobb Braves study. People keep pointing to the fact that property values around the stadium have increased since 2013 when the stadium was announced. I’m not saying they haven’t increased! I’m saying they haven’t increased any differently than anywhere else in Atlanta. And I use some pretty technical methods to demonstrate this as well, but that’s not a legitimate reason to say that the stadium caused this. When I say this, a former county commissioner, Bob Ott, always chimes in and says, “He’s not even looking at the data, the data shows the property values have increased!” And I’m like, “I’m directly looking at that!” It’s like they don’t want to hear it, and the response is just to say the same thing maybe louder or more angry.
ND: When they hear what you’re saying, do they genuinely not believe it? Are they upset about the fact that you’re calling out the emperor for not wearing clothes? What can you tell about what is going on in their heads?
JCB: I would say most people I talk with sincerely believe there’s a strong economic engine. I can’t say with certainty what inside anyone’s head, but just the nature of the response, how it’s said. I don’t even get the “Look, I understand this ended up costing us, but I still think it’s a good expenditure.” I talk to 10 people, I might hear one person say that. Nine times out of 10: “No, no, no, no, no. You don’t understand. Do you know what life was like?”
This is one of the great things I’ve loved about doing this study. People may not know this about me, but my whole family is from this area. I grew up in Charlotte, but I lived in this area. For most of my adult life I’ve lived here, and I grew up coming here. And his “you don’t understand what the area was like before the stadium” — yes, I do! I used to go to Cumberland Mall on Thanksgiving weekend. I understand exactly what that area has been like over the years. I know all the back road shortcuts to get around the perimeter interchange at 285 and 75. I know all the back roads around that. I know exactly what’s there.
So in that sense, I have that on people as well: I do understand what the area used to be like and what it is like. And of course it’s nicer than it was — because everywhere in Atlanta is nicer than it was 10 years ago. That’s just normal.
ND: I want to talk to you briefly about film subsidies as well, which is something I know that you’ve looked at. If there’s resistance to examining the realities of sports stadium finance, I feel like it’s triple that for film subsidies. There are plenty of people who are willing to say maybe this is just billionaire sports team owners trying to put one over on us. But when it’s about film, it’s like, well, this has to be a benefit, right? Look at all the jobs that it’s creating, you can see all the film shoots going on! But the numbers aren’t a whole lot better there, right?
JCB: Yeah, the numbers are terrible. It’s kind of funny: I like to say that politicians love jocks and movie stars, and they’re the ones who are able to get the subsidies, it seems.
One of the reasons I started looking at film subsidies is that someone approached me actually, because I’d been doing some sports stadium stuff, and said, “What do you know about these film subsidies?” this is in 2017, so not that long ago. Georgia’s film subsidy program had really been going since 2005, and they sort of updated in 2008. So they’ve been going on for a long time. So I said, well, I’ll look into that.
And when I looked in at how this law actually works in Georgia, I couldn’t believe it. I was like, they do what? We give them how much money? Thirty percent of every film spent is covered by taxpayer dollars in Georgia? Let me add that up. Oh, my gosh, we’re talking about $1.2 billion last year — that’s four and a half percent of the state’s budget. That’s insane!
And I would talk to people, casual acquaintances, friends, like, “Oh, what are you working on?” And I’d say I’m studying film subsidies, and they’d be like, “Oh, isn’t that just great. It’s so good for the economy!” And I would say, actually it’s not. They go, that’s not how it works. And I would explain to them, no, it is how it works. Basically, they get a tax credit and then they sell the tax credit to a taxpayer who was going to pay that tax to the treasury, but then pays it to a Hollywood movie company. And they’re like, “Oh my God!” They recoil in horror.
That’s a program that unlike sports stadiums has been flying under the radar. I know a lot of states have them, it’s just very big in Georgia. But the amazing thing, particularly in Georgia — I mean, I’ve talked to people who were elected members of the state legislature who don’t understand how it works.
So I do think that that’s something that enjoys popular support from ignorance of the populace. People just don’t know. But that is being totally driven by private interests, who do spend a considerable amount lobbying on it. If you look at what happened in Georgia this past legislative session, a senator got an amendment to the budget that would cap the film tax credit at $900 million a year — $900 million! And the film industry freaked out, ran every lobbyist down to the Capitol and they had that thing shut down in 36 hours. You know, it was gone. So when there’s a lot of money at stake, they’re able to jump to and do that.
I’m talking mainly about Georgia here, but I’ve actually done a study where I looked at film incentives throughout the country, and we don’t seem to see any economic impacts from having a film incentive program in your state. And they’re pretty expensive in terms of the amount of money that’s given up.
ND: Yeah, like you were saying before, it’s another one of these areas where there’s probably a price point where it would make sense at some tiny fraction of the amount of money that’s being given out. I don’t know if it’s the film industry who were writing the bills and getting them passed through the legislatures — it varies state to state — but most states seem to be at best going back and forth between throwing an insane amount of money at film subsidies and then scaling way back for a few years and being like, “Oh no, we’ve lost film production to another state, let’s throw insane amounts of money back at it again!”
JCB: Yeah. And you know, I will say that also the media that covers the film industry isn’t as savvy as the sports industry — not saying that the media covers sports stadium subsidies very well. But for a while when I started studying film subsidies, I would see a reporter write something like “The Georgia film industry has a $9.5 billion impact on the state of Georgia and creates 92,000 jobs a year.” And I would write the reporter — behind the scenes, this is privately — “Hey, you’ve got some bad numbers in your story. That’s not a legitimate number.” They would argue with me. They would get mad at me. “I’ve got a legitimate source. Those numbers are correct.”
I’m like, the source is the Motion Picture Association of America, which represents the five Hollywood studios! That’s a lobbying group! “I’m sorry. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” They cut me off. I was thinking, oh my gosh, I’m sitting here giving you a story. So at this point I just said, well, I’m not going to be nice anymore: You publish a bad stat like that, I’m going to embarrass you on Twitter, because you didn’t do your research. Because I found that being nice actually got a hostile response from people: “Don’t you dare tell me how to write my story!”
These ideas just get ingrained. And I’m not sure the best way to combat it other than to always be willing to stand up and say it. And at the end of the day you’re going to just have to take the L, but at least you tried, you know?
ND:Yeah, I guess the lesson from all of the sports stuff is that if you shout loud enough and long enough for 30 years and have every economist in the country chiming in and tons of other people, that maybe you will get to the point where at least the journalists will quote you as a dissenting viewpoint — before going back to the official studies that claim all sorts of bogus crap.
JCB: That’s part of the reason why I wanted to do this case study for the Braves stadium — just so most people know, as an academic, I get no credit for doing this. I just said, what if I take a different approach? Because I think that we as economists or regional science researchers, we do our job: We go and do these studies, we send them off to get academic peer review, or they’re reviewed by other experts. They say, yes, it’s good. We publish it. And we go, “Hey, why aren’t you listening to us?” And then you go and read one of these studies and it makes my head hurt, and I understand this stuff. Of course no one’s listening to us.
So my thought was, what if I go through a case study that everyone sees, and I’m going to walk through it really slowly and say, “Here’s why this argument doesn’t work,” or “Here’s where this funding source is connected to this.” “Here, we can put these in real dollar terms. Let’s put it in per-person terms.”
Now, even my own analysis of it is still a little bit perhaps too esoteric, but I had to make some calls as to: Do I want to be thorough, or is this going to be short and sweet? But one of the reasons why I did this is that maybe the way to have an effect is to just to speak more clearly, put it in a language that perhaps people can understand.
And I will say this, and this is something that I’ve realized with these recent stadium campaigns that have happened — you mentioned Buffalo already, but in Washington, and now in Tennessee, and it looks like we’re going to have one in Kansas City, and I won’t be surprised if we have one in Tampa Bay before too long. I think that I have overestimated how much people know about the research on the economic impact of sports stadiums. Because I’ll even talk to a reporter, and they like haven’t heard of this stuff. I’m thinking, my god, you don’t know about the 130 studies. And then I’m like, of course they don’t know about the 130 studies. They’re not an economist. They don’t read this stuff.
Perhaps we need to do more. If you care about this and think it’s important as a policy issue, it’s not just, okay, I’ve done the work, wipe your hands and walk off and hey, that’s the policymakers, it’s on them.
It is to some extent on them. But I’m a state employee. I feel I have an obligation to taxpayers to speak up and say, “Hey, I think you’re making a mistake. Here’s the evidence.” So at least when someone comes out and they’re covering a story and they don’t cover it well, I want them to know that there’s going to be some consequence for that. Whether it’s just some public shame, or maybe it’s changing policy.
ND: Well, I’m sure we could spend another four hours talking about this, but we should probably wrap things up. Thank you so much — this is extremely educational, as always. And I am going to be very interested to see where you and some other folks take this.
JCB: Hey, thank you, Neil. And I appreciate all the work you do with Field of Schemes. It’s just so hard to keep up with all these deals as they happen, and so I’m always checking to see what you’re saying about it. I’m like, oh my gosh, I didn’t even know about this one! I think I’ve got some pretty good searches going, and you’re always finding ones that I missed. So I love your take, and I get so much information from you.
ND: Happy to help wherever I can, or at least to help in allowing readers to laugh to keep from crying.
JCB:Yeah, exactly.
