TY  - JOUR
AU  - Miguel,Edward
AU  - Saiegh,Sebastián M.
AU  - Satyanath,Shanker
TI  - National Cultures and Soccer Violence
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 13968
PY  - 2008
Y2  - April 2008
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13968
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13968.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Edward Miguel
Department of Economics
University of California, Berkeley
530 Evans Hall #3880
Berkeley, CA 94720
Tel: 510/642-7162
Fax: 510/642-6615
E-Mail: emiguel@econ.berkeley.edu

Sebastian M. Saiegh
Department of Political Science, Social Sciences B
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, CA 92093
E-Mail: ssaiegh@ucsd.edu

Shanker Satyanath
Department of Politics
New York University
19 West  4th Street
New York, NY 10012
E-Mail: shanker.satyanath@nyu.edu
AB  - 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.
ER  -