Olympic Wrestling Trials and Economic Impact

Sports economists have been notorious for their consensus on the limited impact that sporting events have on local economies.  Studies from all types of sporting events (Super Bowl, World Cup, etc.) tend to find little to no economic gains from these events (opens up in a .pdf file).  So recently the Daily Iowan reports that Iowa City hopes to repeat the economic boom from recently hosting the Olympic wrestling trials in April of 2012.  That got me to thinking about sporting events and economic impact and is Iowa City special?  So what I decided to do was to look at hotel/motel sales tax revenues up to and during this time period and see if there was some uptick in tax revenue to support the hypothesis. So I grabbed the Iowa Hotel and Motel Tax Summary by fiscal year and broken down by quarter from the 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 fiscal years - which covers the Olympic wrestling trials time period.  I then calculated the change in hotel/motel tax from the previous quarter in the third column.  The nominal (not-seasonally adjusted) data is below.

Time		Hotel Tax		Change
Sep-08		$67,418		-----
Dec-08		$53,756		-----
Mar-09		$51,041		-----
Jun-09		$52,528		-----
Sep-09		$59,684		($7,734)
Dec-09		$34,466		($19,290)
Mar-10		$43,241		($7,800)
Jun-10		$51,075		($1,453)
Sep-10		$56,922		($2,762)
Dec-10		$42,011		$7,545
Mar-11		$48,458		$5,217
Jun-11		$64,880		$13,805
Sep-11		$69,035		$12,113
Dec-11		$49,425		$7,414
Mar-12		$52,339		$3,881
Jun-12		$65,518		$638

As you can see there is not much change from second quarter of 2011 and the second quarter of 2012 in terms of tax revenues.  Given that Johnson County (where both Iowa City and Coralville are located) has kept the same hotel/motel tax rate (7%) during the entire time period, it does not look like there is much economic impact of the Olympic wrestling trials (even if all the gains were due to the trials as opposed to hotel and motel attendance for parents of University of Iowa graduates during this time).