Building Nations Through Shared Experiences: Evidence from African Football

We thank Alberto Alesina, Sam Bazzi, Francesco Drago, Leopoldo Fergusson, Matthieu Couttenier, Quoc-Anh Do, Marcel Fafchamps, Ignacio Munyo, Wolfgang Stojetz, Jorge Tovar, Oliver Vanden Eynde, David Yanagizawa-Drott, Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, Jeff Staton, and especially Leonard Wantchekon for insightful comments. We also thank seminar participants at BU, Brown, FGV São Paulo, GWU, Harvard, Lausanne, Messina, Nottingham, NYU-Abu Dhabi, PSE, PUC Chile, PUC Rio, Sciences Po, SMU, Universidad Adolfo Hurtado, Universidad de Chile, Universidad Diego Portales, Universidad de Los Andes, Universidad del Rosario and Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, and participants in the 2017 NBER Summer Institute in Development Economics, APSA Annual Meeting, the 20th Annual Conference of the SIOE, the 2016 Barcelona Summer Forum, the 2017 Oxford CSAE Conference, the 2016 MIPP Workshop in Political Economy and Political Science, the 2016 NEUDC, the 2016 LACEA Meeting, the 2016 RIDGE-LACEA Workshop in Political Economy, and the 2016 AL CAPONE meeting, and the 2018 Harvard Political Economy of Religion Seminar for helpful discussion. Christine Cai, Florin Cucu, Carlos Molina Guerra, Sebastian Melo, Francisco Eslava, and Catalina Morales, provided excellent research assistance. Emilio Depetris-Chauvin acknowledges financial support from CONICYT, FONDECYT Iniciación 11160290. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.