Study indicates racial bias in NBA refereeing

Usually, it's the antics of players like Ron Artest that draw the ire of the National Basketball Association.

This time, however, the NBA has a slightly less athletic target: a Wharton professor.

Business and Public Policy professor Justin Wolfers recently completed a paper with Cornell University graduate student Joseph Price that suggests implicit racial bias exists on the basketball court.

The NBA has responded by questioning the merits of the two scholars' research.

The professors analyzed foul calls for regular-season NBA games from 1991 to 2004, and, according to their research, white referees called fouls at a greater rate for black players than they did for white players.

Wolfers and Price found a less-strong but similar bias of black referees calling fouls more frequently against white players.

The paper claims that "the bias in refereeing is large enough that the probability of a team winning is noticeably affected by the racial composition of the refereeing crew assigned to the game."

Since The New York Times made the study a front-page story on May 2, the NBA has heavily criticized Wolfers's research, releasing its own study that the league says reveals no evidence of racial bias in foul-calling.

NBA records specify which referee called each foul - information the league used in its study but will not release to the public.

Wolfers, who has read the NBA report, said the league misinterpreted its own study.

"Their data shows they actually agree with me," he said. "Their statistics show there's evidence of own-race base."

NBA officials declined to provide further information for this article.

Wolfers also questioned the authority of NBA officials and players to criticize his work.

"None of these guys called me a bad basketball player," he said. "The called me a bad economist. Quite frankly, I think I'm a terrible basketball player. But I don't know that they're in a position to judge my economics."

David Berri, a professor of applied economics at California State University-Bakersfield, wrote in an e-mail that Wolfers's analysis was well-tested and reasonable.

"Wolfers-Price offered several formulations of their model and kept returning to the same results," he wrote. "This suggests that they are on to something."

Experts cite Wolfers's limited data set of information available from box scores as the study's central flaw.

"I think they did good work, but they need to come a little bit closer to telling us more precisely who blew the whistle," said Earl Smith, a sociology professor at Wake Forest University.

Smith added that, without knowing the race of the referee making the call, there is not enough information to draw definitive conclusions.

And some criticize the NBA for refusing the release the information necessary to do that.

"There are very easy ways of stripping all identification from NBA data and allowing other people to look at it, and they're not doing that," said David Karen, a sociology professor at Bryn Mawr College. "That makes them somewhat suspicious."

Allen Sanderson, a sports economist at the University of Chicago, added that the criticism Wolfers faces from the NBA is neither unexpected nor uncommon.

"The NBA, their official stance has to be, 'Of course there's no bias,'" he said, likening the paper to Penn Sociology professor Janice Madden's 2004 study on racial differences in the hiring and firing of NFL coaches - differences the National Football League denied, even when confronted with "pretty good evidence."

"The Wolfers-Price story is consistent with other stories in professional sports," Sanderson said.

But the implications of Wolfers's study may reach far beyond the basketball court - a place often noted as an example of objectivity, with highly trained officials in a public venue.

"People in many domains are involved in the subjective evaluation of others," Wolfers said. "It makes you wonder where else [implicit racial bias] is being displayed."

Penn Sociology professor Camille Charles agreed.

"What's important here is that they're showing that, even in this place that we think of in such idealistic terms, as beyond racism, that it does happen here," she said. "This is still an issue that we as a society haven't dealt with."

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