Graduation Year

2026

Date of Submission

4-2026

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Economics

Reader 1

Serkan Ozbeklik

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Abstract

This paper examines whether the arrival of a major-league professional sports team in a U.S. metropolitan area causes wages in local hospitality industries to rise or fall. Using Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages data covering 383 metropolitan areas from 1990 to 2024, I exploit variation in team-arrival timing across 24 treated MSAs and 12 cohorts to estimate wage effects using three staggered difference-in-differences estimators: two-way fixed effects, Sun-Abraham (2021), and the stacked regression of Cengiz et al. (2019). I report results on both the full never-treated MSA pool and a propensity-score-matched 1:2 sample of demographically comparable controls. Three findings emerge. First, aggregate effects are negative and concentrated in food services (NAICS 722): a 3.6 percent real wage decline on the full pool, attenuating to 3.0 percent on the matched sample. Second, the aggregate masks substantial cohort heterogeneity: MSAs gaining their first-ever major-league team show wage effects roughly twice as large as marginal-team additions, with first-team food-services declines of 4.3 to 5.4 percent. Third, the mechanism check on NAICS 7112 (spectator sports) is consistent with team arrivals being real economic shocks. The pattern of negative resident-serving wage effects concentrated in first-team cities is consistent with the compensating-differentials framework of Roback (1982) and Carlino and Coulson (2004). Pre-treatment event-study coefficients are statistically indistinguishable from zero, and Rambachan-Roth (2023) sensitivity bounds exclude zero under strict parallel trends.

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