Lecture: John Siegfried October 14, 2005

John Siegfried, professor of economics at Vanderbilt University and secretary-treasurer (chief administrative officer) of the American Economic Association (AEA), will give a talk, titled ?The Economics of Public Subsidies for Sports Facilities,? on Friday, Oct. 14, at 3 p.m. in the Gould Library Athenaeum. The event is free and open to the public.

In 2000, Siegfried and Andrew Zimbalist, the Robert A. Woods Professor of Economics at Smith College, published a paper in the AEA Journal of Economic Perspectives, titled ?The Economics of Sports Facilities and Their Communities.? They reported that taxpayers have been the primary investors in stadia built for the use of privately-owned professional sports teams since the 1950s. Team owners have argued that sports facilities boost local economic activity; however, economic reasoning and empirical evidence suggest the opposite. Public support for stadia is also driven by demand for community image, and owners of sports teams supply a scarce input into image enhancement?participation in the major league?for which they have been able to extract monopoly rents from dispersed taxpayers. The authors suggested reforms to dissipate the monopoly sports leagues exercise when negotiating with host communities for their teams.

Siegfried has taught at Vanderbilt since 1972. ). His areas of expertise include antitrust economics, industrial organization and the economics of sports. He received his B.S. in economics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, his M.A. from Pennsylvania State University and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin.

Siegfried has been a consultant on about 30 antitrust cases and a half dozen cases involving other issues. He has served as an expert witness in cases involving mergers, predation, horizontal and vertical restraints and price discrimination. His long list of publications includes an article on the challenging objective of ?Keeping Economics from Becoming a Sexy Social Science.?

Siegfried is currently on the board of directors of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the National Council on Economic Education. He is a past president of the Southern Economics Association and the Midwest Economics Association. He served on the President?s Council of Economic Advisors and as a senior staff economist with the Federal Trade Commission. He is the academic advisor for the Princeton Economics Group.

Siegfried?s son, Brendan, is a first-year student at Carleton.

For more information and disability accommodations, call the Carleton economics department at (507) 646-4109.