Birmingham's new Dome or Doom? Part II.
continued from an earlier post. Don't assume that the following thoughts are all my own. My thoughts were formed from an article from Policy Studies Review,Spring 1998 by Andrew Zimbalist. Click here to see a Google Search of the Zimbalist article. I am not through reading all of them but I hope to go through all the articles which cite this one in order to broaden my views on the economic impact of stadiums and domes on a city.
"Dozens of studies have been performed by consulting firms under contract with the affected city or team. Predictably, most of these studies have concluded that there would be a substantial, positive impact from adding a sports team. There are several methodological difficulties with these studies."(Zimbalist) Here are some of them.

1. They [the studies] do not sufficiently account for the difference between new and diverted (or gross and net) spending. In other words, the studies aren't conscious of the fact that people have a finite amount of their income to spend on entertainment.If they spend $100 to attend a sporting event, that means they will have $100 less to spend on movies, shopping, and restaurants. "The dollar spent at sports events usually replaces the dollar spend elsewhere in the local economy. The spending impact is practically nil."
2. The main source of net spending is out-of-town visitors to a ballgame.This number is practically small for professional sports teams. It consists of the visiting teams and out-of-town media. Most of this will be offset by road trips by the local team and media. I would like to add that the employees attracted to new jobs at a dome stadium will be seasonal and part-time at best.
3. The economic impact is often exaggerated by assuming that an unrealistically large share of executive and player salaries remains in the local economy. The more a team's owner and its players live and spend their income in the host city,the larger the economic impact. Last I checked, minor league teams didn't pay much more than the local Post Office and I have never seen a study on the economic impact of postal employees.