Abstract des Autors

The consensus among economists is that tangible effects associated with hosting major sporting events are close to non-existent. Costs associated with these events are usually covered by public funds, creating opportunity costs that outweigh the associated benefits. However, existing research has mainly focused on major international sporting events that require large-scale (public) investments to build the necessary facilities to host them. This paper focuses on the world's most prominent professional cycling event, the Tour de France, which does not require large-scale infrastructural investments. Deploying appropriate regression modeling to regional level data, we find that hosting the Tour de France does not seem to have a significant impact on the annual gross domestic product (GDP) or employment in related sectors.