The COVID-19 pandemic increased the risk of travelling, working, and participating in public events. To test whether there were gendered differences in the response to COVID-19, we examine the behavior of male and female professional tennis players. We use data from major tennis tournaments which included a rather large number of athletes withdrawing from play. After controlling for past performance, wealth, and other relevant player attributes, we find that female tennis players were more likely to withdraw. This suggests that high-earning women may have greater risk aversion, especially related to COVID-19, than their male counterparts. Importantly, women were more risk-averse when it comes to international travel.

This paper studies the effect of fan attendance on home field advantage in top European soccer leagues. We exploit exogenous variation in the level of fan attendance driven by COVID-19 mitigation policies and find that the home field advantage, as measured by home minus away (expected) goals, is reduced by more than 50% across the English Premier League, German Bundesliga, Italian Serie A, and Spanish La Liga. This leads to a decrease in probability for a home win, indicating that these goals are pivotal with respect to match outcomes.

The present study examines a specific type of referee biases, home bias, and analyzes how the presence of fans affects home bias by using NBA games played in empty arenas during the COVID-19 pandemic in the 2020-2021 season and matches played before the pandemic from 2017 to 2020. This research also uses a unique data set from NBA Last Two Minute Reports to assess referees' performance at the play level. The findings show crowd support does not cause referees to treat home and away teams differently in crucial situations during the NBA regular season, contrary to the results in most prior studies.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that football matches may have played a role in the spread of COVID-19 all over Europe. Nevertheless, from a scientific point of view, the impact of football matches on the spread of COVID-19 remains unclear. In this paper we study, via a quantitative analysis, the case of Italy, a country badly affected by COVID, and one where attending football matches is very popular. We consider the impact of matches played in January and February 2020 on the dynamic of the pandemic in March and April the same year. Our results, which consider all levels of Italian professional football, and the highest level of amateur football, show that matches played in January and February had an impact on the evolution of the pandemic in March and April. These results suggest that great care must be taken before considering re-opening stadia.

Madden (2004) and Madden and Ruther (2009) provide evidence that African American National Football League (NFL) head coaches significantly out-performed their white counterparts between 1990 and 2002. They conclude that this evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that African Americans had to be better coaches than whites in order to be hired as a head coach in the NFL. In 2002, the NFL promulgated the Rooney Rule requiring NFL teams to interview a minority candidate when appointing new head coaches, as well as other affirmative efforts. This paper analyzes whether the performance advantage of African American head coaches has been eliminated in the time since the Rooney Rule's affirmative efforts have been in effect. The paper also examines racial differentials in performance in other NFL coaching positions that were less affected by Rooney Rule affirmative efforts, finding no similar time trends in performance differentials by race.