Thaindian News

Washington, Mar 23 (ANI): A new study by NIH researchers has found that incidents of domestic violence go up if a favoured NFL team loses.

Calls to the police reporting men’s assaults on their wives or intimate partners rose 10 percent in areas where the local National Football League team lost a game they were favored to win, according to the study.

Football games are emotionally laden events of widespread interest, typically garnering 25 percent or more of a local television viewing audience. The disappointment of an unexpected loss, the researchers concluded, raises the risk that football fans may react inappropriately.

Co-authors David Card and Gordon Dahl compared the pre-game betting odds to the game results of regular-season games for six NFL teams-the Carolina Panthers, Detroit Lions, New England Patriots, Denver Broncos, Kansas City Chiefs and Tennessee Titans-between 1995 and 2006. This information was matched to records collected from 763 jurisdictions in the relevant states from the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), a database of local police reports.

In one-third of the games they tracked, the local team was expected to win by four or more points. When the favored team lost, however, Card and Dahl’s analysis revealed a spike in reports of violence by men against a female partner at home, as compared to weeks the home team did not have a game.

The research is published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. (ANI)