Violence and social cultures

How do violence and civil strife influence a country's social culture and vice-versa? Edward Miguel, Sebastián M. Saiegh, and Shanker Satyanath have an NBER paper, National Cultures and Soccer Violence, that seeks to give some explanations.

The authors study the behavioural patterns of the thousands of international players playing in the common institutional environment of the European professional soccer leagues and finds, "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 but not other dimensions of play, such as regular (no-card) fouls or goals scored".

They find that 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.