Abstract
Economists have found mixed evidence on what happens when the number of police increases. On the one hand, more law enforcers means higher probability of detecting a crime, which is known as monitoring effect.
On the other hand, criminals incorporate this increase into their decision making process and thus may commit less crimes, constituting the deterrence effect. This study analyzes the effects of an increase in the number of on-field college football officials, taking players as potential criminals and officials as law enforcers.
Analyzing a novel play by play dataset from two seasons of college football, we report evidence of a monitoring effect being present in the overall dataset. This effect is mainly driven by offensive penalties which are called in the area of jurisdiction of the added official.
The decomposition of the effect provides a limited evidence for the presence of the deterrence effect in the case of penalties with severe punishment and committed by teams with moderately high ability.