Via Andrew
Sullivan, odd and clever abstract of the day: Civil War
Exposure and Violence, by Edward Miguel, Sebastián M. Saiegh, and Shanker
Satyanath:
In recent years scholars have begun to focus on the
consequences of individuals’ exposure to civil war, including its severe health
and psychological consequences.
Our innovation is to move beyond the survey methodology that is
widespread in this literature to analyze the actual behavior of individuals
with varying degrees of exposure to civil war in a common institutional
setting. We exploit the presence
of thousands of international soccer (football) players with different
exposures to civil conflict in the European professional leagues, and find a
strong relationship between the extent 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 the effect of civil war exposure rather than simple
rule-breaking or something else entirely, there is no meaningful correlation
between our measure of exposure to civil war and soccer performance measures
not closely related to violent conduct.
The result is also robust to controlling for civil wars before a
player’s birth, suggesting that it is not driven by factors from the distant
historical past.
Rivals Jacqui’s
find for the week: trade secrecy in Willa Wonka’s cholcolate factory.