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Testing for Ethnicity Discrimination among NHL Referees: A Duration Model Approach

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Abstract

Motivated by an endogenity issue between score margin and penalty events, this paper tests for ethnicity discrimination among NHL referees by analyzing over 2.6 million player shifts. Using duration models to compare the penalty rates of various player–referee ethnicity combinations, we find that French Canadian referees call penalties at significantly faster rates on English Canadian players than do English Canadian referees. The results are broadly consistent with the prior discrimination literature and are intuitively reasonable within the context of the historic French–English tensions throughout Canada’s history.

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Notes

  1. See Longley [2006] for an overview of the literature pertaining to labor market discrimination in professional sports.

  2. Mongeon and Longley [2013] re-estimated Price and Wolfers [2010] game-player level analysis by regressing the interaction of referee-race and player-race indicator variables, rather than including opposite referee/player race variable to find that only Black players were discriminated against.

  3. See Longley [2012] for a discussion of discrimination in the NHL within the broader framework of French–English relations in Canada.

  4. In baseball, each umpire ball/strike decision is an observable record that can be used for analysis purposes.

  5. In addition to this endogeneity between score margin and penalty events, various systematic biases in the penalty calling of NHL referees are also possible. Mongeon and Mittelhammer [2012], for example, find both a home-team bias and a close-game bias, with the latter referring to situations where referees call penalties in a manner that keep games close by calling more penalties on teams that are leading (rather than trailing) in games. Referees have been found to exhibit systematic biases in other sports as well. For example, biased officiating has been found to contribute to the home advantage effect in soccer [Nevill et al. 2002; Sutter and Kocher 2004; Garicano et al. 2005; Witt 2005; Boyko et al. 2007; Buraimo et al. 2007; Dawson et al. 2007; Dohmen 2008; Pettersson-Lidbom and Priks 2010], Australian Football [Mohr and Larsen 1998], and the NBA [Price et al. [2012]], as well as various events at both the Summer and Winter Olympics [Balmer et al. 2001; Balmer et al. 2003]. Moskowitz and Wertheim’s [2011] book Scorecasting also provides evidence of home team and omission biased officiating in hockey as well as other sports.

  6. The empirical strategies used by both Price and Wolfers [2010] and Parsons et al. [2011] only identify opposite-race player–referee interaction effects, not the specific group being discriminated against. Mongeon and Longley [2013] present an empirical methodology that allows one to make a precise identification using a fixed effects model. They re-estimate Price and Wolfers [2010] game-player level data, and find that only black players were discriminated against.

  7. Goaltenders play the entire game (i.e., they do not take shift in a similar manner to players) and very rarely are called for penalties. Therefore, they are excluded from the analysis.

  8. Recall that a player’s shift begins when he steps on the ice from the bench, and ends when he returns to the bench.

  9. The score is relative to the start of the shift. There are a few cases that the score can change during a player’s shift. Considering that on average there are less than 10 score changes in a game these cases are extremely small relative to the entire data set.

  10. Each hockey game consists of three distinct playing periods lasting 20 min. There is a break at the end of both the first and second periods where each team retires to their respective locker rooms while the ice is being resurfaced. The winner of a game is determined by the team that has scored the most goals by the end of 60 min of regulation time. If the score is tied at the end of regulation time, five additional minutes of sudden death overtime is played, and if still tied, each team participates in a shoot-out until a winner is decided. Each team plays with five skaters during regulation play and four skaters during overtime play.

  11. During the 2008–2010 NHL seasons, the average length of a player’s shift was approximately 47 s, with players generally playing between 20 and 30 shifts per game, with only a fraction ending in a penalty call, making many penalty events censored observations.

  12. Only a count of the number of shots that player p took on his shift are included in the shot count, not the number of team shots that occurred during his shift.

  13. Various different weights can applied to the “other” control variables (non-player and non-referee fixed effects), altering the magnitude of the estimates but not the relative difference between the player-ethnic/referee-ethnic mixes. For example, setting the weight of the home team indicator equal to 1 and all of the score fixed equal to 0 would result estimates relative to the home team in tied games.

  14. A hazard ratio of one implies the same in the hazard rate of two groups.

  15. 1.3(=(0.013−0.0072) × 12 × 20).

  16. 1.03(=0.2062 × 5).

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank anonymous referees’ and the editor as well as numerous attendees at the 2011 Southern Economics Association conference, and the 2012 European Conference on Sport Economics for helpful suggestions.

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Mongeon, K., Longley, N. Testing for Ethnicity Discrimination among NHL Referees: A Duration Model Approach. Eastern Econ J 41, 86–101 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/eej.2013.41

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