By CATHERINE RAMPELL

Besides being a big day for eating, Thanksgiving is a big day for another American tradition: football-watching. A new working paper, however, makes this ritual a bit more ominous than turkey-stuffing.

The study, by the economists  David Card at Berkeley and  Gordon B. Dahl at the University of California-San Diego, looked at police reports of family violence on Sundays during the professional football season. (An earlier, free version of the study is here.)

The researchers were interested in what happened when a home team suffered an upset, which they defined as losses in games that the home team had been predicted to win by more than 3 points.

Economix.blogs.nytimes.com