Economics research · October 15, 2026 · Batch 7a
What would hosting actually change?
Compare the same game stage under campus and destination arrangements. Keep school finances, visitor activity, fan access and travel emissions in separate accounts. A gain in one does not establish a gain in the others.
A research pack, with prices still to collect
This release supplies the questions, case structure and evidence requirements. It contains no priced hosting comparison, estimated local benefit or football carbon total. Licensed hotel data, actual itineraries, contractual terms and host certification remain open.
Download the case and travel template (JSON) · Download the readable worksheet
Four accounts, four different questions
| Account | Measure | Required check |
|---|---|---|
| School retained cash | Receipts kept less incremental costs | Use the existing school cash worksheet. Reconcile payer and recipient; reimbursements and internal transfers count once. Record payment dates and shortfall responsibility. |
| Community activity | Additional rooms sold and taxable activity | Separate room quantity from price. Examine displacement, local spending substitution, leakage and public-service costs. Hotel revenue is neither local welfare nor school income. |
| Fan access | Out-of-pocket trip cost and practical access | Include tickets, transport, lodging, care, accessibility, missed work and advance payment. Record cancellation exposure and funded student support. |
| Travel emissions | Transport kg CO₂e within declared boundaries | Source actual origins, modes, distances and factors. Keep transport separate from lodging, food, waste and venue operations unless those are also measured. |
Start with Austin and University Park
Texas and Penn State are contrasting research cases, not confirmed hosts, matched controls or a representative sample. Hold round, opponent, attendance scope and date constant within each campus-versus-destination comparison. The downloadable templates leave the event date and destination unassigned.
| Case | Known context | Next evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Texas · Austin | The 2026–27 academic calendar lists residence halls closing December 15 and reopening January 8; spring classes begin January 11. An optional winter term runs December 15–January 9. | Confirm game-date housing exceptions, dining, student transport, accessible rooms and host staffing. A break does not mean every student is absent. Obtain dated campus and destination quotes. |
| Penn State · University Park | Second case selected for comparison. Current housing, dining and exam access have not yet been verified in this pack. | Verify the applicable calendar and municipality/hotel catchment before assigning a date. Obtain comparable travel, lodging and operation quotes; do not reuse annual athletics expenses as per-game costs. |
For each case and venue, low, central and high remain blank until supported by quotes or defensible ranges. Each input needs a named collector, source date, price-validity window, payer, cash due date and refund terms. The host worksheet still governs operational certification: open host responsibilities and backups.
Count journeys before multiplying by factors
- Define event, party type and scope: teams and staff, students, other fans, officials and production crew. Record exclusions explicitly. Use aggregate origin regions; avoid collecting home addresses.
- Give each unique journey an ID. Record actual segments, including between-venue travel and return legs. Ticket appearances are not unique travelers; do not count the same trip once for each session.
- Record mode, distance unit and whether a distance is one-way, return or a single segment. Vehicle-mile factors require vehicles or occupancy conversion; passenger-mile factors already use passengers. Record room-nights separately.
- For cost, capture party size, payer, fare/vehicle cost, lodging, taxes, fees and cancellation terms. Avoid counting a school reimbursement again as a new system cost.
- For emissions, record factor source, version, unit, CO₂ versus CO₂e and reporting boundary. Use the EPA factors hub as one source to evaluate; organizational reporting factors are not automatically a full lifecycle inventory. No factor values are imported here.
Do not assume all fans originate at campus. Missing distance, mode, occupancy or a compatible factor means the affected estimate stays missing. Compare both venue arrangements using the same population and boundary before drawing a conclusion.
A local impact study must pass a data gate
Proposed protocol, not a completed analysis. Investigate observed campus playoff events from 2024 and 2025. Never code a hypothetical future BetterCFB game as an observed treatment.
- Inventory first: record geography, dates, definitions, missingness, reuse rights and collection costs. Daily rooms sold is the preferred primary outcome only if licensed data is obtainable. Hotel revenue and room rates are secondary.
- Freeze the comparison: select candidate controls using pre-event economy, college presence, hotel capacity and trends. Exclude competing home games and plausible spillovers within the same catchment. Record city and surrounding hotel boundaries before seeing event effects.
- Freeze time: propose a seven-day lead and lag around the event, with fourteen-day sensitivity, using at least two years of comparable calendar coverage. Check holidays, weather, other events, weekday patterns, pre-trends and placebo dates. Do not choose the window because it becomes significant.
- Estimate cautiously: hosting depends on team success. A matched difference-in-differences design does not remove every selection bias. Predeclare treatment timing and inference suitable for a small number of city clusters; many days do not create many independent cities.
- Stop when unsupported: if licenses, comparison cities, outcome timing or pre-trends fail, publish the coverage decision rather than a causal number. Public quarterly tax data may support a separate coarse descriptive analysis; it cannot substitute for daily hotel outcomes.
Texas allocation components include filing timing, prior periods and audit adjustments. Do not shift a headline allocation by exactly two months and call it event sales. Public historical sales data offers quarterly taxable-activity measures by geography and industry; no data export has been collected for this release.
What the supplied papers change
Review scope: abstracts, methods, selected results and limitations from three supplied PDFs. Tables have not been independently reproduced; this is not a claim of exhaustive literature review. Private attachments are not republished.
| Source | Adopt | Limit and decision |
|---|---|---|
| Coates & Depken · 2011Mega-Events: Is Baylor Football to Waco What the Super Bowl is to Houston? | Match economic geography, seasonality and reporting frequency; distinguish event types. | Twenty-three Texas cities, monthly 1990–2008 data. Use the comparison discipline; do not transfer historical dollar coefficients to a new playoff. The supplied filename says 2010; the journal article is 2011. |
| Baumann, Matheson, Stephenson & Muldowney · April 2026Comparing the Visitor Impact of Events at Professional Sports Facilities · supplied manuscript | Separate rooms sold, rates and geography; account for displacement and other events. | Five-city licensed hotel setting. Do not equate hotel revenue with net welfare. Our proposed windows are declared in advance rather than selected by significance. Publication status is not asserted. |
| Cooper & McCullough · 2021Bracketing sustainability: Carbon footprinting March Madness to rethink sustainable tourism approaches and measurements | Use modular transport, lodging, food, waste and venue accounts with explicit boundaries. | 2019 basketball assumptions include campus-origin fans and simplified travel. Replace those assumptions with actual origins and itineraries. Do not transfer its emissions total or sector shares to football. |
Other leads and open inputs
Three additional economics papers recommended in correspondence remain unread: Baade, Baumann & Matheson (2008); Coates & Humphreys (2002); Matheson & Baade (2006). They are research leads, not findings adopted here. Actual meeting notes, prices and contractual allocations remain outstanding.
Next: fill two supported cases
Batch 7b can begin when both venue arrangements have comparable dated quotes and an assigned collector. Accept a case only when school cash reconciles, missing items remain visible, student and accessible travel are costed, and low/central/high assumptions have sources. An unfavorable result is a reason to revise the plan, not to discard the case.
The current proposal’s venue rules remain unchanged. No campus-saving, economic-impact or environmental-benefit claim is established by these templates.