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… Click to show full 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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