Does the Presence of Professional Football Cause Crime in a City? Evidence from Pontiac, Michigan

Joshua Hall and Hyunqoong Pyun
Additional contact information
Hyunqoong Pyun: West Virginia University, Department of Economics

No 16-02, Working Papers from Department of Economics, West Virginia University

Abstract: We empirically explore the relationship between the National Football League (NFL) and crime using daily panel data from Detroit. We exploit the natural experiment of the Detroit Lions movement from Pontiac MI to downtown Detroit in 2002 to examine the impact of NFL games on crime in a jurisdiction. Pontiac is used as a treatment city and other suburban cities are used as a comparison group. Employing a triple difference-in-difference approach, we find little to no change in crime on a home game day in Pontiac compared to other suburban cities. There is no difference in crime between the football season and off-season, among the groups, after the Lions moved. While not conclusive, our results are suggestive that professional football does not create additional crime except for larceny.

Keywords: National Football League; stadium; National Incident-Based Reporting System; crime; externality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 15 pages
Date: 2016-03
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/cgi/viewcontent ... =econ_working-papers (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
Journal Article: Does the presence of professional football cause crime in a city? Evidence from Pontiac, Michigan (2019)
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:wvu:wpaper:16-02

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Department of Economics, West Virginia University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Feng Yao ().