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The public cost of Minor League Baseball stadium subsidies

John Charles Bradbury

Economic Inquiry2026https://doi.org/10.1111/ecin.70055article
AJG 3ABDC A
Weight
0.50

What the paper says

Public financing of major league sports venues has been widely studied, but government support for minor league facilities has not been systematically documented. This study introduces a new database of Minor League Baseball stadium funding to measure the prevalence and magnitude of subsidies. State and local governments have spent $7 billion constructing and renovating 134 minor league ballparks for Major League Baseball (MLB) affiliates, raising important policy implications for moderately sized municipalities. Using MLB's reorganization of its minor leagues as a natural experiment, the analysis finds no income differences between cities that lost or retained teams, undermining the economic rationale for taxpayer subsidization.

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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/ecin.70055

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@article{john2026,
  title        = {{The public cost of Minor League Baseball stadium subsidies}},
  author       = {John Charles Bradbury},
  journal      = {Economic Inquiry},
  year         = {2026},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/ecin.70055},
}

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The public cost of Minor League Baseball stadium subsidies

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Evidence weight

0.50

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20
M · momentum0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.