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

By Alex Bryson. Economics Letters, 2020

171 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5b88cb1de168e81c9e3d32cf42a147fc324849d8

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In Economics and Econometrics

1. Dominik Schreyer
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3. Carl Singleton

In Gender Studies

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In Sociology and Political Science

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Citations in the corpus

• Eliminating Supportive Crowds Reduces Referee Bias (2021, background): “, Bryson et al., 2020; Endrich and Gesche, 2020; Scoppa, 2021). Similarly, some have observed that the foul ratio changed to the disadvantage of the home team without crowds present (e.g., Endrich and Gesche, 2020), while other aspects of the match, such as the total number of goals scored, remained”