IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/applec/v51y2019i36p3958-3970.html

Does the presence of professional football cause crime in a city? Evidence from Pontiac, Michigan

Author

Listed:
  • Hyunwoong Pyun
  • Joshua C. Hall

Abstract

Using daily panel data from Detroit, we empirically explore the relationship between the National Football League (NFL) and crime in a city. We exploit the natural experiment of the Detroit Lions’ move from Pontiac, Michigan, to downtown Detroit in 2002. Pontiac is used as the treatment city and non-game day crime, other suburban cities, and other cities outside Detroit MSA are used as the comparison groups. Employing a difference-in-difference approach, we find decreases in assaults and vandalism on home game days in Pontiac relative to the control cities after the Lions’ move. We find weak evidence of a net decrease in larceny and vandalism in Pontiac on home game days following the loss of professional football. No changes in assaults and auto theft are reported. While not conclusive, our results suggest that professional football leads to additional larceny and vandalism incidents but no effects on assaults and auto theft.

Suggested Citation

  • Hyunwoong Pyun & Joshua C. Hall, 2019. "Does the presence of professional football cause crime in a city? Evidence from Pontiac, Michigan," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 51(36), pages 3958-3970, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:applec:v:51:y:2019:i:36:p:3958-3970
    DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2019.1588942
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00036846.2019.1588942
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/00036846.2019.1588942?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or

    for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Bagwell, Ryan & Leal, Wanda E. & Kondrat, Allison & Piquero, Alex R., 2025. "Variation in location and type of property calls for service in New Orleans on NFL and NBA Gamedays," Journal of Criminal Justice, Elsevier, vol. 101(C).
    2. Hyunwoong Pyun & Jeeyoon Kim & Torsten Schlesinger & Luca Matto, 2020. "Positive Externalities from Professional Football Clubs in the Metropolitan Rhine-Ruhr, Germany: Trickle-Down Effects Associated with Promotion and Relegation," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(20), pages 1-12, October.
    3. Hiroaki Funahashi & Alexander Cardazzi & Nicholas Masafumi Watanabe, 2023. "Mass Gathering Sport Events and the Spread of Viral Respiratory Infection: Japanese Professional Baseball and Influenza," Journal of Sports Economics, , vol. 24(5), pages 551-578, June.
    4. Hyunwoong Pyun, 2019. "Exploring causal relationship between Major League Baseball games and crime: a synthetic control analysis," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 57(1), pages 365-383, July.
    5. Geoffrey Propheter, 2023. "Sports Facilities as a Housing Amenity: Do Prices Follow Facilities?," Journal of Sports Economics, , vol. 24(4), pages 443-474, May.
    6. Brad R. Humphreys & Hyunwoong Pyun, 2018. "Professional sporting events and traffic: Evidence from U.S. cities," Journal of Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 58(5), pages 869-886, November.
    7. Dennis Mares & Emily Blackburn, 2019. "Major League Baseball and Crime: Opportunity, Spatial Patterns, and Team Rivalry at St. Louis Cardinal Games," Journal of Sports Economics, , vol. 20(7), pages 875-902, October.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:applec:v:51:y:2019:i:36:p:3958-3970. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RAEC20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.