Causal effects of an absent crowd on performances and refereeing decisions during Covid-19

Alex Bryson, Peter Dolton (), J Reade, Dominik Schreyer and Carl Singleton
Additional contact information
Peter Dolton: Department of Economics, University of Sussex

No em-dp2020-18, Economics Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, University of Reading

Abstract: The Covid-19 pandemic has induced worldwide natural experiments on the effects of crowds. We exploit one of these experiments that took place over several countries in almost identical settings: professional football matches played behind closed doors within the 2019/20 league seasons. We find large and statistically significant effects on the number of yellow cards issued by referees. Without a crowd, fewer cards were awarded to the away teams, reducing home advantage. These results have implications for the influence of social pressure and crowds on the neutrality of decisions.

Keywords: Attendance; Coronavirus; Covid-19; Home advantage; Natural Experiments; Referee Bias; Social Pressure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C90 D91 L83 Z20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2020-08-06, Revised 2020-11-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-env, nep-exp and nep-spo
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Published in Economics Letters, 2021, 198, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econlet.2020.109664

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.reading.ac.uk/web/FILES/economics/emdp202018.pdf Revised version, 2020 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Causal effects of an absent crowd on performances and refereeing decisions during Covid-19 (2021)
Working Paper: Causal effects of an absent crowd on performances and refereeing decisions during Covid-19 (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:rdg:emxxdp:em-dp2020-18

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, University of Reading Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Alexander Mihailov ().