Research into domestic violence has found that when a professional football team has an unexpected loss, intimate partner violence in its home market can increase by 10%.
A new analysis from researchers at the University of Oregon found that this effect is amplified in states with legalized sports betting. Sports gambling is currently legal in 38 states, including Oregon and Washington. Thirty states — including Oregon — also allow mobile sports betting, which researchers found further increased the chance of a spike in intimate partner violence.
Kyutaro Matsuzawa and Emily Arnesen are both economics PhD candidates at UO. They join us with more details on their analysis.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Research into domestic violence has found that when a professional football team has an unexpected loss, intimate partner violence can increase by 10%. A new analysis from researchers at the University of Oregon dug deeper into that. It found that this effect is amplified in states where sports betting is now legal. That is the case in 38 states, including Oregon and Washington. Kyu Matsuzawa and Emily Arnesen are both economics PhD candidates at the U of O. They join us now with more details. It’s good to have both of you on Think Out Loud.
Emily Arnesen: Thank you so much for having us.
Kyutaro Matsuzawa: Thank you so much for having us.
Miller: Emily, first – as I noted briefly, your study builds off an analysis from 2011, a dozen years ago, that looked at domestic violence and unexpected football losses. What did that research find?
Arnesen: What they basically looked at was when a home NFL team lost unexpectedly – by unexpected they meant that they were expected to win by a certain spread, in that case, three or more points, and they lost – that unexpected loss then increased intimate partner violence significantly.
Miller: Kyu what’s the theory behind why?
Matsuzawa: The argument that those papers make which we agree on is the emotional cues. It’s the emotional fluctuation. They came in watching the football game, thinking that they will see a win, that their home team will win, and that they could celebrate. But they ended up losing, so they’re in a bad mood as a result.
Miller: And that bad mood made people, who I assume already had some propensity for violence, more likely to be violent with the people around them?
Matsuzawa: Yes. And another possible explanation could be the use of alcohol. There’s a high correlation between sports viewership and alcohol use. They could be more likely to be drinking more during those stressful games.
Miller: Emily, how did you want to expand on that study for your new analysis?
Arnesen: We came up with the idea of including sports betting in the analysis, as sports betting has recently been legalized in many states. The ability to legalize sports betting happened just six years ago now, where the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a law banning sports betting in the United States, in states other than Nevada. So we wanted to incorporate that, as we feel like now there is a financial implication for some people as they bet on sports. And so if they experience an upset loss and they lose money, does that increase their propensity to commit violence?
Miller: Is there existing literature, Kyu, that tells us something about the relationship between gambling in general, and domestic violence or intimate partner violence?
Matsuzawa: Yes. So there is a wide variety of studies that have documented some association between problematic gambling and domestic violence. But many of these studies were based on survey analysis. So while there’s consistent evidence, the evidence is not super compelling. But there is strong evidence that there’s a strong association between gambling – not just sports gambling, but other forms of gambling – and domestic violence.
Miller: Emily, you mentioned and I just mentioned it briefly in my intro that just in the last handful of years, sports betting has become legal in a significant majority of this country – 38 states. What does the sports gambling landscape look like right now? What’s the scale of it?
Arnesen: The sports gambling landscape varies across states. So here in Oregon, we can either go to a tribal casino and bet – and there are a couple tribal casinos where we can do that – or we can bet on the app DraftKings, the only app that’s available in Oregon. Other states have multiple apps that you can bet on. Places like Washington state, you can only bet on tribal lands. But there is a variety of ways you can bet. And some states that have bigger handles, such as New York and Tennessee, they typically have more bets and more money passed through for all sports.
Miller: Kyu, how much money are we talking about here?
Matsuzawa: About $100 billion per year. There’s an estimate that says that it could grow up to $300 billion in the near future.
Miller: We’ve been using different phrases here and I think it’s worth zeroing in on them. In the past, I feel like I’m more used to the phrase “domestic violence.” You use the phrase “intimate partner violence” in your paper. What’s the difference?
Matsuzawa: Those are the same thing. However, intimate partner violence is a more technical research term. Another difference between intimate partner violence and domestic violence is domestic violence also includes family violence, like violence against their children. We, because of data limitations, specifically only look at violence against partners, like spouses, or girlfriends, or boyfriends. That’s the distinction between intimate partner violence and domestic violence.
Miller: Let’s turn more squarely to your new analysis. Emily, what crime statistics did you look at to determine rates of intimate partner violence around these unexpected losses?
Arnesen: So we use nationally compiled data from the FBI called NIBRS, which is the National Incident-Based Reporting System. That gives us incidents where police were called for, in our case, intimate partner violence calls. We use those, and look at counts of intimate partner violences by agency. An agency could be, say, Eugene Police Department, it could be a county sheriff, it could be a state patrol agency. We use these agencies to identify intimate partner violence counts for each county, and go from there.
Miller: And how much did legalized sports gambling amplify the increase in intimate partner violence rates that were found in the original analysis a dozen years ago?
Matsuzawa: We say about 9% points, or about 0.04 per 100,000 people.
Miller: How significant is that from an economist’s perspective, from a statistical perspective?
Matsuzawa: It’s a pretty significant number. It’s a really big number, but we also think it’s not too big. It’s definitely a plausible number. But it’s definitely a really significant, like large number.
Miller: Emily, my understanding is there wasn’t an across the board increase, that there was some variation. So what kinds of factors, state to state, or community to community, led to even higher rates of intimate partner violence when you were looking at unexpected losses?
Arnesen: So there’s a couple different ways that we looked at this result. We first broke it up into states that had online betting or mobile betting legalized, and states that had in-person legal betting legalized, and compared those two. Some states were in both of those categories as they have both in person and online or mobile betting legalized, whereas some states only fall into one of those categories. So we compared those first, and we saw a huge increase when mobile betting is legalized. Some of our thoughts behind that are people then can go bet right at their fingertips, and it’s relatively easy to do, whereas if you have to go to a sports book or a casino to go bet, it may take you firstly out of the home, so you don’t commit violence. But also, you may be less likely or less inclined to bet, or you may bet earlier and so the loss isn’t as fresh, especially with the financial loss.
We also look at things such as paydays, and we split our weeks of the season up into potential pay weeks and non potential pay weeks, based on the last week of the month and then approximately the second week of the month. And we find that during or around pay weeks, intimate partner violence, when there’s an upset loss, increases. There’s a couple of other things that Kyu would love to talk about too.
Matsuzawa: Another interesting thing we look at is we look at the share of the gambling market by each state, and we find that in states where there are more money being bet on per month, there is a bigger impact of this upset loss, which continues to suggest that it’s more of like the financial loss mechanism.
And another thing we looked at is this thing called a hot hand fallacy. We look at home teams that were on a winning streak … and there are papers that have found that this psychology phenomenon called recency bias, where if a team is on a winning streak or hot streak, then fans will expect them to win or have more tendency to bet on supporting this team. We basically find that the effect is even bigger for those teams that are on a winning streak. So this is consistent with the hot hand … fans betting on teams that are on like a hot streak.
Miller: Emily, what do you want policymakers, especially in these states where the phenomenon seems to be the most dramatic – states like Oregon where mobile betting is allowed, for example – [to] do with this information?
Arnesen: Well, we believe that there potentially is no going back with sports betting, and we don’t believe that we should repeal sports betting within the states. However, we wanted to draw awareness to one potential negative consequence of legalizing sports betting. We also, in our conclusion, talk about some of the positive things that come from sports betting, such as increased tax revenues for the states. These tax revenues range from anywhere between a very small percentage, and some states tax up to 51% of sports betting revenues. These revenues go towards many different things to help fund the states. A lot of states, it goes to a general fund, education, help for gambling addiction is also a very common thing. Here in Oregon, it helps pay down the public pension liability. And so we just want policymakers to be aware of, here’s something that could happen. In all the good that comes out of sports betting, there is potentially some negative consequences.
Miller: Emily Arnesen and Kyu Matsuzawa, thanks very much.
Arnesen: Thank you.
Matsuzawa: Thanks very much.
Miller: Emily Arnesen and Kyu Matsuzawa are economics PhD candidates at the University of Oregon.
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