Regulators and Redskins
Bentley Coffey, Patrick A. McLaughlin, Robert D. Tollison
Received: 17 November 2009 / Accepted: 25 February 2011
Presentation by: Summer Dickey
Existing Data
 (Ekelund et al. 1994)
 Rent seeking
 Barro 1973; Becker and Stigler 1974; McCormick & Tollison 1978; Besley 2006
 Higher pay is deterrent to corruption
 Carlino and Coulson (2004)
 Housing rents about 8% higher in cities with NFL teams
 Wages about 2% lower in areas with teams
 Coates and Gearhart (2008)
 No evidence that either a NASCAR track or NASCAR event affects housing
rents positively or negatively
 Coates and Humphreys (2002)
 Residents of cities whose teams won Super Bowls experience a small but
statistically significant increase in real per capita personal income in the same
year
*None that directly tests impact of amenities on bureaucratic behavior
Regulators and Redskins
Does the performance of the Washington Redskin have any
impact on federal government activity?
 𝐻1 : Wage Hedonics
 Role of federal government’s compensation package in
attracting and retaining skilled laborers
 𝐻2 : Transaction Costs
 Each federal employee’s objective is to maximize his/her power
*Not mutually exclusive
Pages of Federal Register each quarter
and the Redskins end of season WP
Quarterly RGDP and quarterly Federal
Register pages
Ratio of quarterly Federal Register
pages to RGDP (FR pages/RGDP)
Econometric Model
u  well-behaved disturbance term
R  page count of the Federal Register
W  history of Redskins W-L record
Q()  maps history into a current measure of team’s quality
GDP  control variable that captures general trend of R
increasing over time with the size of the economy
*Winning Percentage (WP) at that point in the current season
Results
 Quarterly
 Federal Register pages positively correlated to WP and
significant at 1% level
 RGDP significantly positive
 For an increase in the WP in 2007 from .50 to 1.0, predicts a
9% increase in the quarterly pages of the Federal Register
 Annual
 Significant positive correlation with previous season’s WP or
playoff berths
 Congressional Behavior
 No Redskin effects
 Washington area sports teams
Conclusions
 At least one local amenity – a winning professional football
team – is associated with more regulatory output from the
federal government
 Existence of winning football team may simply provide an
environment conducive to logrolling
 Could explain use of public funds to subsidize teams
 Thoughts on the paper…