Family Violence and Football: The Effect of Unexpected Emotional Cues on Violent Behavior

By David Card, Gordon B. Dahl. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2011

691 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the link between family violence and the emotional cues associated with wins and losses by local professional 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 pre-game 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 percent 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 (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.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/477efbca0432eda16839839c4104a8b5abbfaedb

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Citations in the corpus

College Party Culture and Sexual Assault (2016, methodology): “Again following Card and Dahl (2011), we measure upsets using the pre-game point spread calculated by Las Vegas bookmakers to equilibrate betting markets.”
Misinformation During a Pandemic (2020, positive): “…increase hate crimes (Müller and Schwarz, 2018; Bursztyn et al., 2019) and mass killings (Yanagizawa-Drott, 2014); it can also affect health outcomes, such as domestic violence (Card and Dahl, 2011; Banerjee et al., 2019b) and fertility choices (La Ferrara et al., 2012; Kearney and Levine, 2015).”
Expectations as Endowments: Evidence on Reference-Dependent Preferences from Exchange and Valuation Experiments (2011, neutral): “not matter for valuation, but standard errors are large enough that there would not have been (4)As discussed by DellaVigna (2009), a similar argument could explain List’s (2003) finding that experienced sports card traders, who may expect to trade the item they get endowed with, do not seem to disp”
Reference-Dependent Job Search: Evidence from Hungary (2017, positive): “We build on the job search intensity model presented in Card et al. (2007a) and in Lentz and Tranaes (2005) by adding a reference dependent utility function in consumption with a backward looking reference point.”
Intimate Partner Violence: The Influence of Job Opportunities for Men and Women (2019, background): “use violence to extract resources from the woman or her family (Bloch and Rao, 2002); and that violence occurs almost inadvertently in response to emotional cues (Card and Dahl, 2011).”
Goal Setting and Energy Conservation (2014, background): “This paper adds to the growing body of empirical evidence of referencedependent preferences (Camerer et al., 1997; Crawford and Meng, 2011; Pope and Schweitzer, 2011; Card and Dahl, 2011) in a new context, with goals that act as endogenous and measured reference points.”
Emotional Judges and Unlucky Juveniles (2018, positive): “26 Using aggregate level county data, Card and Dahl (2011) show that an upset loss leads to around ten percent increase in the rate of at-home violence by men against their wives or girlfriends.”
Violence Against Women: A Cross-Cultural Analysis for Africa (2016, background): “[15] Card, D.”