National Cultures and Soccer Violence / Edward Miguel, Sebastián M. Saiegh, Shanker Satyanath.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Miguel, Edward.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Saiegh, Sebastián M.

Satyanath, Shanker.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w13968.

NBER working paper series no. w13968

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2008.

Summary:

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.

Notes:

Print version record

April 2008.