Testing for Ethnicity Discrimination among NHL Referees: A Duration Model Approach

Motivated by an endogenity issue between score margin and penalty events, this paper tests for ethnicity discrimination among NHL referees by analyzing over 2.6 million player shifts. Using duration models to compare the penalty rates of various player–referee ethnicity combinations, we find that French Canadian referees call penalties at significantly faster rates on English Canadian players than do English Canadian referees. The results are broadly consistent with the prior discrimination literature and are intuitively reasonable within the context of the historic French–English tensions throughout Canada’s history.