The 1996 Summer Olympics had a statistically significant and substantial positive impact on jobs in metro and suburban Atlanta; for example, employment gains due to the games exceeded gains in comparable counties by 11% four years later, says a team led by Julie L. Hotchkiss of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and Georgia State University. If you take into account the support for the games provided by federal and local governments, the taxpayer cost amounted to roughly $1,700 per job created; for comparison, the taxpayer cost per job created in the 1990s by non-Olympic economic initiatives in New York, Michigan, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Georgia ranged from $2,500 to an estimated $147,000, the researchers say.
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