A Stadium by Any Other Name

Abstract

Since the 1990s, an increasing number of professional sports teams have sold the naming rights for their facilities to private firms. Although some policy makers have protested the private sector's appropriation of naming rights, no one has questioned the value of this strategy to the firms that buy the naming rights. The authors use a one-step version of event analysis to show that naming rights do not have a lasting impact on the profitability of the firms that buy them.