published as "Match rigging and the career concerns of referees" in: Labour Economics, 2011, 18(3), 349-359
This paper contributes to the literature on competition and corruption, by drawing on records from Calciopoli, a judicial inquiry carried out in 2006 on corruption in the Italian soccer league. Unlike previous studies, we can estimate the determinants of match rigging and use this information in identifying corruption episodes in years in which there are no pending judicial inquiries. We find evidence of corruption activity well before Calciopoli. Career concerns of referees seem to play a major role in match rigging. An implication of our study is that a more transparent selection of the referees and evaluation of their performance is essential in removing incentives to match rigging. Another implication is that in presence of significant "winners-take-all" effects, more competitive balance may increase corruption unless media concentration is also significantly reduced.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.