The Impact of Hosting Mega-Sporting Events on Urban Industrial Transformation: Evidence from a Staggered Multi-period Difference-in-Differences Design

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Against the backdrop of mounting pressure on local public finances and continued efforts to stimulate domestic demand, rigorously assessing the economic consequences of mega-sporting events is essential for both event-bidding decisions and post-event urban development. Using panel data for 207 prefecture-level cities in China from 2000 to 2023, this study treats a city's first hosting of a national-level mega-sporting event—including the Olympic Games, Asian Games, and National Games—as a quasi-natural experiment with staggered treatment timing. A multi-period difference-in-differences (DID) framework with city and year fixed effects is employed to estimate the effect of hosting on two dimensions of industrial transformation: industrial structure upgrading, measured by the ratio of tertiary- to secondary-industry value added, and industrial structure rationalization, proxied by overall labor productivity. The regressions further control for key city-level economic and fiscal characteristics. The results show that hosting a mega-sporting event is associated with a statistically significant increase in the tertiary-to-secondary industry ratio, with the estimated upgrading effect becoming most pronounced two to four years after the event. Hosting is also associated with higher overall labor productivity, although this effect is comparatively modest. Event-study evidence supports the pre-treatment parallel-trends assumption, and placebo and alternative-specification tests indicate that the baseline results are robust to several sensitivity checks. By moving beyond single-city case studies and static before-and-after comparisons, this study provides multi-city evidence on the dynamic industrial consequences of mega-sporting events in China.