"Super Bowl Babies": Do Counties with Super Bowl Winning Teams Experience Increases in Births Nine Months Later?
Abstract
Following the claim of a highly publicized National Football League (NFL) commercial,
we test whether the Super Bowl provides a positive exogenous shock to fertility in
counties of winning teams. Using stadium locations to identify teams' counties, we
analyze the number of births in counties of both winning and losing teams for ten
recent Super Bowls. We also test for state effects and general effects of the NFL
playoffs. Overall, our results show no clear pattern of increases in the number of
births in winning counties nine months after the Super Bowl. We also do not find that
births are affected at the state level or that counties competing in the playoffs
are affected. Altogether, these results cast doubt on the NFL's claim that winning
cities experience increases in births nine months after the Super Bowl.
Type
Journal articlePermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/19223Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1177/2378023117718122Publication Info
Hayward, George M; & Rybińska, Anna (2017). "Super Bowl Babies": Do Counties with Super Bowl Winning Teams Experience Increases
in Births Nine Months Later?. Socius : sociological research for a dynamic world, 3. pp. 237802311771812-237802311771812. 10.1177/2378023117718122. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/19223.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Anna Rybinska
Research Scientist
Anna Rybińska is a postdoctoral research scientist for Family Connects Internationaland
the Prospective Study of Infant Development. She joined the Center for Child and Family
Policy in August 2019. Her research interests focus broadly on the variation in family
formation patterns across t

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