Employment Effects of the FIFA World Cup on Host Nations : An Event Study

Sammanfattning: The employment effect of hosting the FIFA world cup has been researched multiple times with city, municipality, or state data using a variety of methods. Arguably, the Difference-In-Difference (DID) method, first used by Hotchkiss et al. (2003) then refined by countless others, is the most common method for measuring both short-term and long-term employment effects of mega sporting events (Hagn & Maennig, 2008). This event study applies a static and a dynamic two-way fixed effects difference-in-difference model (TWFEDD) to national employment data for 24 nations throughout 42 years between 1979 and 2021. The World Cup hosts included in the study are Mexico 1986, Italy 1990, USA 1994, France 1998, Korea & Japan 2002, Germany 2006, and Russia 2018. The two TWFEDD models fail to reject the hypothesis that there is no causal employment effect when hosting a World Cup.