“Family Violence and Football: The Effect of Unexpected Emotional Cues on Violent Behavior”, 2011-02-01 (; backlinks; similar):
We study the link between family violence and the emotional cues associated with wins and losses by professional NFL football teams. We hypothesize that the risk of violence is affected by the “gain-loss” utility of game outcomes around a rationally expected reference point.
Our empirical analysis uses police reports of violent incidents on Sundays during the professional football season. Controlling for the pregame point spread and the size of the local viewing audience, we find that upset losses (defeats when the home team was predicted to win by 4 or more points) lead to a 10% increase in the rate of at-home violence by men against their wives and girlfriends.
In contrast, losses when the game was expected to be close have small and insignificant effects. Upset wins (victories when the home team was predicted to lose) also have little impact on violence, consistent with asymmetry in the gain-loss utility function.
The rise in violence after an upset loss is concentrated in a narrow time window near the end of the game and is larger for more important games. We find no evidence for reference point updating based on the halftime score.
…Two other recent studies have explored the link bet ween football and violence.
et al 2006 relate police reports of family violence to the occurrence of NFL games involving the local team, and find that game-days are associated with higher rates of violence. 2009 document the effects of college football home games on rates of assault, vandalism, and alcohol-related offenses.6 We go beyond these studies by examining the effects of wins and losses relative to pre-game expectations, by controlling for the size of the local viewing audience, by studying the inter-day timing of violent incidents, by comparing the effects of more and less salient games, and by testing for potential updating of the reference point for game outcomes using the score at half-time.
Our analysis incorporates family violence data for over 750 city and county police agencies in the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS), merged with information on Sunday NFL games played by 6 teams over a 12-year period. Controlling for the pre-game point spread and the size of the local television viewing audience, we find that “upset losses” by the home team (losses when the team was predicted to win by 4 points or more) lead to a roughly 10% increase in the number of police reports of at-home male-on-female intimate partner violence. Consistent with reference point behavior, losses when the game was expected to be close have no statistically-significant effect on family violence. Upset wins (ie. victories when the home team was expected to lose) also have no statistically-significant impact on the rate of violence, suggesting an important asymmetry in the reaction to unanticipated losses and gains.