Fernando Delbianco, Federico Fioravanti, Fernando Tohmé, Martín Trombetta
arXiv 17 Aug 2026 · Econometrics
arXiv:2608.16312 · PDF · Extracted main text
We study the existence of a Regional Differential in rugby sevens: whether, in tournaments where no competing team enjoys formal home status, some national sides systematically over- or under-perform depending on where the event is staged. Using the universe of 2672 men's and women's matches from international rugby sevens tournaments played between 2016 and 2025, principally the World Rugby Sevens Series, but also the World Cup Sevens and the Olympic Games, we replace the binary “locality” indicator of the classic home advantage literature with continuous measures of geographic, temporal, and cultural proximity between each team and the host country. We show that aggregate associations between proximity and performance (which appear large and highly significant in naive specifications) are almost entirely an artifact of team composition and scheduling: once team and opponent quality are absorbed through fixed effects in a symmetric team-match panel, no general regional advantage survives. However, this null aggregate masks substantial heterogeneity. For a well-defined subset of teams (most notably France, but also New Zealand, the United States, Canada, Spain, Ireland, Kenya, Samoa, and Brazil), performance declines significantly and monotonically with the distance separating the host city from home. Some of the established southern-hemisphere powers (Fiji, South Africa, Australia, Argentina) are essentially distance-neutral. We further show that for some teams the gradient operates through east-west jet lag rather than pure displacement. The Regional Differential in sevens is therefore real but team-specific rather than universal, a distinction obscured by pooled estimation.
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| Reference | Intensity | Mentions | Sections | Main text | |
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| 1 | Alesina, Alberto and Devleeschauwer, Arnaud and Easterly, William an… (2003) Fractionalization | 0.941 | 6 | 5 | 83% |
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| 4 | Nutting, Andrew W. and Price, Joseph (2017) Time Zones, Game Start Times, and Team Performance: Evidence from the NBA | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 5 | Recht, Lawrence D. and Lew, Robert A. and Schwartz, William J (1995) Baseball teams beaten by jet lag | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
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| 7 | Agnew, Gary A and Carron, Albert V (1994) Crowd effects and the home advantage. | 0.405 | 1 | 1 | 100% |
| 8 | Bilalić, Merim and Gula, Bartosz and Vaci, Nemanja (2021) Home advantage mediated (HAM) by referee bias and team performance during COVID | 0.405 | 1 | 1 | 100% |
| 9 | Alex Bryson and Peter Dolton and J. James Reade and Dominik Schreyer… (2021) Causal effects of an absent crowd on performances and refereeing decisions during COVID-19 | 0.405 | 1 | 1 | 100% |
| 10 | Carmichael, Fiona and Thomas, Dennis (2005) Home-field effect and team performance: Evidence from English premiership football | 0.405 | 1 | 1 | 100% |
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