Nicholas Masafumi Watanabe

This study examines the impact of stadium locations on attendance in the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL). We develop a match-level attendance model incorporating control variables such as market factors and consumer preferences to assess attendance for NWSL games. Our results indicate that attendance drops the further an NWSL stadium is from the city center. Specifically, the coefficients suggest an inverse relationship between attendance at NWSL matches and the distance to the city center, indicating that for every mile further an NWSL team was from the city center, attendance declined by about 6.6%. Our findings show that some of the perceived differences in demand for women’s soccer may be due to infrastructural inequalities such as stadium locations. Therefore, one way to boost demand and attendance in professional women’s sport, specifically soccer, is to move away from suburban stadiums and toward downtown locations.

Despite its long-standing history as the most popular and mainstream combat sport, boxing has been confronted with increased competition from mixed martial arts (MMA) in recent decades. The dominant organization in the MMA market, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), has grown to become a multibillion dollar organization. In this article, we directly compare consumer interest and fighter compensation between boxing and the UFC to consider the economic potential for these combat sports into the future. Overall, our conclusions indicate that boxing has continued to be more lucrative as a whole, with the key factor being the presence of superstar athletes.

Using weekly-level influenza case data from all 47 prefectures in Japan alongside data from Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) league from 1999 to 2018, we examine the effect of hosting games on local influenza transmission. The results highlight that during the flu season, for every NPB game held at its home ballpark, there is an average increase of 0.18 cases per sentinel medical institution (SMI) between that week and the following week. The effects are robust to different specifications and placebo tests. This translates to about a 0.1% increase in the number of cases during the overlap of NPB and flu seasons.