Professional Sports Events and Public Spending: Evidence from Municipal Police Budgets

Prior evidence reveals a causal relationship between sporting events and crime. If sporting events increase crime, they also increase public spending on policing. We analyze the crime-police spending relationship using data from the Annual Survey of Public Employment & Payroll over the periods 1979–1995 and 1997–2010 for a sample of 52 US municipalities with and without teams. Reduced form regression models reveal that police employment increases with the arrival and departure of an NFL team as well as with the number of postseason games played. We argue that both these outcomes generate plausibly exogenous variation in sports-related demand for policing.