Edward Miguel Sebastián M. Saiegh Shanker Satyanath
Abstract
Can some acts of violence be explained by a society's "culture"? Scholars have found it hard to empirically disentangle the effects of culture, legal institutions, and poverty in driving violence. We address this problem by exploiting a natural experiment offered by the presence of thousands of international soccer (football) players in the European professional leagues. We find a strong relationship between the history of civil conflict in a player's home country and his propensity to behave violently on the soccer field, as measured by yellow and red cards. This link is robust to region fixed effects, country characteristics (e.g., rule of law, per capita income), player characteristics (e.g., age, field position, quality), outliers, and team fixed effects. Reinforcing our claim that we isolate cultures of violence rather than simple rule-breaking or something else entirely, there is no meaningful correlation between a player's home country civil war history and soccer performance measures not closely related to violent conduct.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
13968.
Length: Date of creation: Apr 2008 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:13968
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Find related papers by JEL classification: K0 - Law and Economics - - General O57 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economywide Country Studies - - - Comparative Studies of Countries Z1 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics
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