THE DEMAND FOR RUGBY LEAGUE - EVIDENCE FROM CAUSALITY TESTS

During the last few years, there has been an upsurge of interest in the determinants of the demand for professional team sports. Typically, traditional demand estimation techniques are used to examine the determinants of attendance. This paper attempts to show that the use of these techniques may be misleading. Existing studies implicitly or explicitly assume a direction of causality. Econometric estimation techniques are then applied to examine this direction of causality. However, no account is taken of possible spurious regression and time series properties of the data are not fully explored. These omissions may have led to faulty policy recommendations. In attempting to rectify traditional approaches, this study will examine the time series properties of rugby league attendance and success prior to engaging in estimation.