Behavioral responses to terrorist attacks: empirical evidence from professional football

ABSTRACT

Despite a rich literature on the psychological responses to terrorist attacks, surprisingly little is known about the subsequent changes in citizen behavior. In this research note, we exploit a unique sequence of two rare events, the Paris attacks of 13 November 2015 and the cancelation of the international friendly between Germany and the Netherlands over terrorist threats only four days later, to compare the number of German football spectator no-shows, i.e., the number of ticket holders that have decided not to attend a particular football game, before and after these attacks. Although we observe a significant increase in the number of no-shows during the first two weeks after the incidents, this effect was not permanent.

KEYWORDS:

• Attendance
• Bundesliga
• demand
• football/soccer
• no-show behavior
• no-shows
• Paris terrorist attacks
• spectator decision-making
• spectator sports
• terrorism

JEL:

• D12
• D74
• D81
• D90
• L83
• Z20

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ This information on football spectator no-show behavior was recorded with the help of the professional football clubs’ stadium access systems and subsequently distributed to the Deutsche Fußball Liga (DFL). Unfortunately, due to missing data points, we had to eliminate up to 21 Bundesliga games from our initial sample of 306 Bundesliga games.

² Differences to earlier results reported by Schreyer and Däuper (2018) are due to slight differences in the chosen subsamples. More precisely, using list wise deletion of missing data for the season 2015–16, the two authors excluded 24 observations from their sample.