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Exploring causal relationship between Major League Baseball games and crime: a synthetic control analysis

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Abstract

Using the Washington Nationals case, which moved from Montreal, Canada, to Washington, DC in 2005, as a natural experiment, I examine the impact of MLB games on crime in a host city. To address endogeneity concerns, this paper applies a synthetic control method with using 21 large cities which host an MLB team as a “donor pool” and employs a triple difference-in-difference approach to estimate the change in crime before and after the Nationals coming, between MLB season and off-season, and Washington, DC and the synthetic Washington. With using monthly crime data from the Uniform Crime Report, only assaults increased by 7–7.5% annually after the Nationals moved to DC; other crimes were unchanged. This result is supported by statistical significance and in-space placebo tests, and several alternative specifications in robustness check. These increases in assaults could be associated with additional costs, annually from $20 to $35 million. Little to no evidence of a causal relationship between MLB games and other types of crime.

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Notes

  1. Billings and Depken (2011) instead find a spatial concentration of crime on event days.

  2. Munyo and Rossi (2013) also exploit natural experiments but they only compare the change in crime between game and non-game days.

  3. Cincinnati had a population less than 300,000 in 2010, but an average population from 2000 to 2010 greater than 300,000.

  4. In the robustness check, results from using cities which do not host an MLB team but have at least one major sports team are provided.

  5. UCR data mostly starts from 2000.

  6. UCR data are available at https://www.icpsr.umich.edu.

  7. In robustness check, I take account of these few games in March and October by using the number of games and monthly attendance.

  8. As the MLB season covers 6 months, I divide the estimated monthly increases by 2 to calculate the annual changes.

  9. Alternative explanation is possible. Game attendance can be interpreted as general interests on a game in a city, so crime could be committed by people who did not attend the game but went to a bar or somewhere to watch the game. So bigger attendance might lead more crime which is not caused by a game attendee. However, as the Nationals’ performance was consistently low in the all sample period, I argue that the general interests stay the same and the estimated effect would capture the direct effect of attendance on crime.

  10. These cities are Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Detroit, and Philadelphia.

  11. These cities are Charlotte, Columbus, Indianapolis, Memphis, Nashville, Oklahoma city, Portland, Sacramento, San Antonio, and San Jose.

  12. All dollar values in here show 2005 dollars as the Nationals moved into Washington, DC in 2005.

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Acknowledgements

I thank Brad R. Humphreys and participants at the 8th European Sport Economics Association Conference and the 2017 Southern Economic Association Conference for valuable comments. I also thank two anonymous referees for their valuable comments and suggestions.

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  1. Department of Economics, West Virginia University, PO Box 6025, Morgantown, WV, 26506-6025, USA

    Hyunwoong Pyun

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Pyun, H. Exploring causal relationship between Major League Baseball games and crime: a synthetic control analysis. Empir Econ 57, 365–383 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-018-1440-9

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