The San Diego Chargers and Oakland Raiders conducted an economic study of the city of Carson that concluded a new stadium would infuse more than $2 billion dollars into the city’s total economic output.
The study, headed by the Institute for Applied Economics, relates to the $1.6 billion stadium plan that the two teams unveiled in February.
It analyzed projections for ticket revenues, parking, concessions and souvenirs, and also forecasted boosts in attendance due to a bigger market.
The construction of the stadium would result in 16,740 annual jobs and $1.1 billion in labor income.
After the stadium is built the city would benefit from 13,000 new jobs and $900 million in total economic output.
However, according to a report from U-T San Diego, these numbers may be a little inflated.
“They’re doing a good job adding and multiplying, and not doing a good job subtracting,” said Victor Matheson to U-T San Diego, an economist at College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, who has studied stadium economics for 15 years. “We can’t find any changes in taxable sales, employment or personal income; any way you measure these things it looks like the net impact of pro sports on host cities is either zero or pretty close to it.”
Alan Gin, an economist at USD, wonders if the study isolated the impacts to all of Los Angeles, or just Carson itself.
“You just follow the standard procedures and you just can’t alter data or anything like that to achieve a particular result,” Gin said to U-T San Diego. “Those numbers seem pretty high. I’d be interested to know whether they tried to isolate impact to Carson itself.”
