Working Paper: NBER ID: w13968
Authors: 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.
Keywords: soccer; violence; culture; civil conflict
JEL Codes: K00; Z13
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Player's home country civil conflict history (F51) | Likelihood of earning yellow and red cards (Z22) |
| Increase in civil war years in player's home country (N42) | Number of yellow cards received (Y10) |
| Player's home country civil conflict history (F51) | Cultural norms regarding violence (Z13) |
| Player's home country civil conflict history (F51) | Violent conduct on the soccer field (Z28) |