Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Department

Economics

Additional Departmental Affiliation

Mathematics

Document Type

Thesis

Abstract

This thesis seeks to analyze the impact of regional identities on American professional sports team valuations. Regional identities are classified as any name of a team that is not tied directly to the city that they reside in. For example, the Carolina Panthers have a regional identity because they are not based out of “Carolina”, they are based out of Charlotte, North Carolina. Another example would be the Arizona Cardinals, whose name encompasses the whole state of Arizona rather than Phoenix, the city they are based out of. The leagues that will be involved in this study are the National Football League (NFL), Major League Baseball (MLB), National Hockey League (NHL), Major League Soccer (MLS), and National Basketball Association (NBA). In these five leagues, teams that reside outside of the United States will not be included due to insufficient statistics about their localities.

From this study, the goal is to see if the results differ from a similar study previously done with teams in the 1990s from the MLB, NFL, NBA, and NHL. As the MLS continues to add more teams as the years go by, this is a good opportunity to look at how these teams should be named from a valuation perspective. To answer that question, panel data regression will be using statistical software R, with a different regression being done on each of the five leagues.

Advisor(s) or Committee Chair

Dennis Wilson, Ph.D.

Disciplines

Economics | Finance | Mathematics | Statistics and Probability

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