Working Paper: NBER ID: w13206
Authors: Joseph Price; Justin Wolfers
Abstract: 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.
Keywords: racial discrimination; NBA; referees; implicit bias
JEL Codes: J15; J71; K31
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| referee race (Z28) | number of fouls called against players (Z22) |
| referee race (Z28) | player performance metrics (Z22) |
| number of fouls called against players (Z22) | game outcomes (Z22) |
| referee race (Z28) | likelihood of predominantly black teams winning or losing (Z22) |
| referee race (Z28) | implicit biases among referees (D91) |