The effects of large-scale, racially-charged violence on labor productivity and racial identity: The riots of 1967–68 and outcomes in Major League Baseball

Sebastian Anti, Andrew W. Nutting and Andrew E. Sfekas

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), 2025, vol. 114, issue C

Abstract: Many major race riots occurred in 1967–68. We investigate whether these riots affected individual labor productivity by studying 240,408 plate appearances from Major League Baseball games in those years. Stacked difference-in-difference and two-way-fixed effects difference-in-difference estimations show that batters, but not pitchers, experienced significantly worsened productivity after major riots in their teams’ home cities. In addition, two-way-fixed effects difference-in-difference estimations show evidence of worsened productivity of pitchers after riots near their birthplaces, and that white batters whose teams’ cities had undergone major riots were hit by fewer pitches from white pitchers. However, these latter results are not robust to stacked difference-in-difference estimators. We discuss these differences in the paper.

Keywords: Labor productivity; Stacked difference-in-difference estimations; Race riots of the 1960s; Baseball; Psychology and behavior; Trauma (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214804324001617
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:soceco:v:114:y:2025:i:c:s2214804324001617

DOI: 10.1016/j.socec.2024.102324

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) is currently edited by Pablo Brañas Garza

More articles in Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().