Racial discrimination among nba referees
By: Joseph Price, Justin Wolfers
Contributors: Wolfers, Justin; National Bureau of Economic Research
Series: NBER working paper series -- working paper 13206; Working paper series (National Bureau of Economic Research : Online) -- working paper no. 13206.
Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research
Published: 2007
Place of publication: Cambridge, MA
Language: eng
Format: [electronic resource] /
Description: "The NBA provides an intriguing place to test for taste-based discrimination: referees and players are involved in repeated interactions in a high-pressure setting with referees making the type of split-second decisions that might allow implicit racial biases to manifest themselves.  Moreover, the referees receive constant monitoring and feedback on their performance.  (Commissioner Stern has claimed that NBA referees "are the most ranked, rated, reviewed, statistically analyzed and mentored group of employees of any company in any place in the world.") The essentially arbitrary assignment of refereeing crews to basketball games, and the number of repeated interactions allow us to convincingly test for own-race preferences.  We find -- even conditioning on player and referee fixed effects (and specific game fixed effects) -- that more personal fouls are called against players when they are officiated by an opposite-race refereeing crew than when officiated by an own-race crew.  These biases are sufficiently large that we find appreciable differences in whether predominantly black teams are more likely to win or lose, based on the racial composition of the refereeing crew"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.
Notes: Title from PDF file as viewed on 7/31/2007.

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