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Sports injuries and game stakes: Concussions in the National Football League

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Pascal Courty at University of Victoria
Pascal Courty
Jeffrey Cisyk at Charles River Associates
Jeffrey Cisyk
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Abstract

The National Football League's regular‐season games are not of equal importance: some games loom larger than others for determining a team's chance to qualify for the playoffs. We develop an incentive‐based measure of the impact of winning a game on a team's qualification probability to study the relationship between stakes and injuries. We find teams are 24 percentage points more likely to suffer concussions in games where a win secures one team a playoff berth. This is the first evidence to support the risk‐escalation hypothesis that injuries increase with a competition's stakes. We then discuss implications for sports injury prevention.
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Sports injuries and game stakes:
Concussions in the National Football League
links to open access materials
Jeffrey Cisyk and Pascal Courty
31 August 2023
1 Main Text
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ecin.13173
Please cite as: Courty, P. & Cisyk, J. (2023) Sports injuries and game stakes: Concussions in the Na-
tional Football League. Economic Inquiry, 1–19. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/ecin.13173
2 Replication Package
https://doi.org/10.3886/E191501V4
Please cite as: Cisyk, J., and Courty, P. (2023) ECIN Replication Package for “Sports injuries and
game stakes: Concussions in the National Football League.” Inter-university Consortium for Political
and Social Research. Available from: https://doi.org/10.3886/E191501V4
1
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Article
Full-text available
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