Learning unethical practices from a co-worker: The peer effect of Jose Canseco

Abstract

This paper examines the issue of whether workers learn productive skills from their co-workers, even if those skills are unethical. Speci…cally, we estimate whether Jose Canseco, a star baseball player in the late 1980's and 1990's, a¤ected the performance of his teammates by introducing them to steroids. Using panel data, we show that a player's performance increases signi…cantly after they played with Jose Canseco. After checking 30 comparable players from the same era, we …nd that no other baseball player produced a similar e¤ect. Furthermore, the positive e¤ect of Canseco disappears after 2003, the year that drug testing was implemented. These results suggest that workers not only learn productive skills from their co-workers, but sometimes those skills may derive from unethical practices. These …ndings may be relevant to many workplaces where competitive pressures create incentives to adopt unethical means to boost productivity and pro…ts. Our analysis leads to several potential policy implications designed to reduce the spread of unethical behavior among workers.

Contagion of pro- and anti-social behavior among peers and the role of social proximity

“…Scholars in economics and psychology have advanced our understanding of peer effects and the underlying mechanisms by capitalizing on comprehensive laboratory and field studies over the past decades, particularly with respect to the study of pro-social behavior, cooperation, and reciprocity (Offerman, 2002;Frey and Meier, 2004;Croson and Shang, 2008;Shang and Croson, 2008;Gächter et al, 2013;Thöni and Gächter, 2015). Peer effects on anti-social behavior have been examined with respect to doping (Gould and Kaplan, 2011), dishonesty ) and theft (Falk and Fischbacher, 2002). 1 Peers have also been found to affect academic gains (Duflo et al, 2011), investment decisions (Bursztyn et al, 2014), littering behavior (Cialdini et al, 1990), productivity at work (Ichino and Maggi, 2000;Falk and Ichino, 2006;Mas and Moretti, 2009), juvenile behavior (Damm and Dustmann, 2014), and charitable giving (Meer, 2011;Smith et al, 2015).…”

Sports at the vanguard of labor market policy

“…The use of performance-enhancing drugs in professional baseball has also made it a useful setting to examine whether information about unethical activities is learned from one's co-workers. One study attempted to examine whether Jose Canseco, a star baseball player who subsequently confessed to using steroids, affected the performance of his teammates by introducing them to steroids [13]. Players' performances were found to increase significantly in the seasons after they played with Canseco.…”

Endogenous network production functions with selectivity

“…Moreover, they consider and explicitly model individual self-selection into teams, while in our network production function team selection is not an individual choice. Finally, Gould and Kaplan (2011) consider the effects of a Major league Baseball player's steroid use on the productivity of his teammates. However, they are teasing out the effects of a single player (and not a network of players) and, therefore, ignore all the problems associated with modeling and estimating peer-effects that Manski (1993), Angrist (2013), and others have highlighted.…”