Public Financing of Professional Sports Facilities and Drug Asset Forfeiture

Local governments provide many crucial services from limited budgets, yet often subsidize the profitable, private businesses in professional sports leagues in the United States. Policing represents one important public service. Policing typically constitutes large portions of government budgets and...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Public finance review 2024-07, Vol.52 (4), p.439-465
Main Authors: Blemings, Benjamin, Humphreys, Brad
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Ambiguity
Assets
Budgets
Drugs
Expenditures
Fairness
Forfeiture
Government spending
Local government
Police
Policing
Professional sports
Public finance
Sports facilities
Subsidies
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Summary:Local governments provide many crucial services from limited budgets, yet often subsidize the profitable, private businesses in professional sports leagues in the United States. Policing represents one important public service. Policing typically constitutes large portions of government budgets and also generates revenue through fines and forfeitures. Existing evidence suggests that large municipal expenditures in other areas can have an ambiguous effect on policing outcomes. This paper addresses the question of whether large public expenditures on sports facilities affect drug asset forfeiture using two-way fixed effects (TWFE) and generalized dynamic model specifications (GDMS). The results are similar across estimation methods, with static TWFE results suggesting a treatment effect of $1,274–5,589 in additional forfeiture per million in subsidies and results from the newer GDMS estimators suggesting $7,703 per million in subsidies. The results imply that, beyond generating no tangible local economic benefits, public subsidization of sports facilities also leads police to make up budget shortfalls by more aggressive policing, which has important implications for racial equity.
ISSN:1091-1421
1552-7530
DOI:10.1177/10911421241232444