The Effect of Inspector Absence on Referees’ Sanctioning Behavior: Evidence from Amateur Soccer

Inspections support agent development and maintain compliance. Systematic behavioral differences between inspected and uninspected situations may be consistent with shirking when formal inspection is absent. We study the inspector absence effect (IAE) by comparing referees’ behavior across inspected and uninspected matches. Using amateur soccer data, we find that referees impose significantly fewer disciplinary sanctions when they are not inspected and that this reduction is strongest among aspiring referees. The IAE does not meaningfully differ between home and away teams, consistent with an incentive-based channel in which formal oversight may raise the costs of shirking and may lead referees to sanction discretionary or borderline incidents more frequently. Furthermore, the estimated IAE is smaller under unannounced than under announced inspection regimes. These results provide evidence that periodic inspection is associated with systematic differences in amateur referees’ disciplinary sanctioning behavior and suggest that inspection design matters when continuous monitoring is infeasible.