1. News reports of ticket scalping for today's Super Bowl in Arizona, reminded me that ASU profs Stephen Happel and Marianne Jennings have done some interesting work on scalping. Here's a Cato piece; here's a post from the ASU business school blog.

2. Yesterday's WSJ reports that Rep. Heath Shuler (NC) and the Rutherford Institute are threatening legislation and litigation, respectively, to force the NFL to loosen its rebroadcast restrictions for churches showing the Super Bowl. It seems like an attempt to violate the NFL's property rights, though the WSJ article does quote an intellectual property attorney who suggests that the NFL's policies encroach upon fair use.

3. Just in time to serve as an antidote to claims that the Super Bowl is a bounty of riches for the host city, the current issue of the Southern Economic Journal features an article by Baade, Baumann, and Matheson examining the relationship between sporting events and taxable sales. (Ungated version here.) The abstract:

Professional sports leagues, franchises, and civic boosters, have used the promise of an all star game or league championship as an incentive for host cities to construct new stadiums or arenas at considerable public expense. Past league-sponsored studies have estimated that Super Bowls, All-Star games and other sports mega-events increase economic activity by hundreds of millions of dollars in host cities. Our analysis fails to support these claims. Our detailed regression analysis of taxable sales in Florida over the period 1980 to 2004 reveals that on, average, mega-events ranging from the World Cup to the World Series have been associated with reductions in taxable sales in host regions of $5 to $10 million per month. Likewise, strikes in Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, and the National Basketball League, each of which has resulted in the cancellation of large parts of entire seasons, appear to have also had no demonstrable negative effect on taxable sales in host cities.