Inside the NBA Bubble: how Black players performed better without fans

Mauro Caselli; Paolo Falco; Babak Somekh

doi:10.1007/s00148-024-01021-y

Inside the NBA Bubble: how Black players performed better without fans

Mauro Caselli^*, Paolo Falco, Babak Somekh

^*Corresponding author for this work

Department of Economics

Research output: Contribution to journal › Journal article › Research › peer-review

5 Citations (Scopus)

11 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

In the NBA, predominantly Black players play in front of predominantly non-Black fans. Using the “NBA Bubble”, a natural experiment induced by COVID-19, we show that the performance of Black players improved significantly with the absence of fans vis-à-vis White players. This is consistent with Black athletes being negatively affected by racial pressure from mostly non-Black audiences. We control for player, team, and game fixed effects, and dispel alternative mechanisms. Beyond hurting individual players, racial pressure causes significant economic damage to NBA teams by lowering the performance of top athletes and the quality of the game.

Original language	English
Article number	39
Journal	Journal of Population Economics
Volume	37
Issue number	2
Number of pages	20
ISSN	0933-1433
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-024-01021-y
Publication status	Published - Jun 2024

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Open access funding provided by Università degli Studi di Trento within the CRUI-CARE Agreement. Mauro Caselli received support from the Institute for Humane Studies (grant no. IHS017265).

Funding Information:
We are grateful to Gábor Békés, Stefano Caria, Mikhail Drugov, Tom Haberstroh, Sylvan Herskowitz, Larry Katz, Kevin Lang, Gianpiero Mattera, Ted Miguel, Brenda Samaniego de la Parra, Ajay Shenoy, and seminar participants at New York University, Baruch College, and the Reading Online Sports Economics Seminar for their useful comments. We are grateful to editor Alfonso Lagunes-Flores and three anonymous referees for their helpful and constructive comments.

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2024.

Keywords

Basketball
COVID-19
D91
Discrimination
Harassment
J15
J71
NBA
Performance
Racism
Z22

Access to Document

10.1007/s00148-024-01021-yLicence: CC BY

FulltextFinal published version, 573 KBLicence: CC BY

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Cite this

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title = "Inside the NBA Bubble: how Black players performed better without fans",

abstract = "In the NBA, predominantly Black players play in front of predominantly non-Black fans. Using the “NBA Bubble”, a natural experiment induced by COVID-19, we show that the performance of Black players improved significantly with the absence of fans vis-{\`a}-vis White players. This is consistent with Black athletes being negatively affected by racial pressure from mostly non-Black audiences. We control for player, team, and game fixed effects, and dispel alternative mechanisms. Beyond hurting individual players, racial pressure causes significant economic damage to NBA teams by lowering the performance of top athletes and the quality of the game.",

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