Revisiting Racial Bias in NBA Refereeing: First So Back, Then So Over

David Pipke

No yg6ap_v1, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Influential studies by Price and Wolfers (2010) and Pope et al. (2018) document racial bias among NBA referees and suggest that heightened awareness can reduce it. Using an independently assembled player–game dataset for 1988–2025 that links box scores to referee crews, I replicate the original findings and extend them. Racial bias is present in 1988–2007 and largely absent in 2007–2014, reemerges in 2015–2019, and disappears again from 2020 onward. Merging games to county–day measures of Black Lives Matter protest activity, I find lower bias when local protest intensity is higher. These associations are consistent with awareness-driven reductions in discrimination.

Date: 2025-09-30
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-spo
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/68da4f8c11b9e1389e432b50/

Related works:
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:osf:socarx:yg6ap_v1

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/yg6ap_v1

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SocArXiv from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().