Learning Unethical Practices from a Co-worker: The Peer Effect of Jose Canseco

Eric Gould and Todd Kaplan

No 3328, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper examines the issue of whether workers learn productive skills from their co-workers, even if those skills are unethical. Specifically, we estimate whether Jose Canseco, one of the best baseball players in the last few decades, affected the performance of his teammates. In his autobiography, Canseco claims that he improved the productivity of his teammates by introducing them to steroids. Using panel data on baseball players, we show that a player’s performance increases significantly after they played with Jose Canseco. After checking 30 comparable players from the same era, we find that no other baseball player produced a similar effect. Clearly, Jose Canseco had an unusual influence on the productivity of his peers. These results are consistent with Canseco’s controversial claims, and suggest that workers not only learn productive skills from their co-workers, but sometimes those skills may derive from unethical practices. These findings may be relevant to many workplaces where competitive pressures create incentives to adopt unethical means to boost productivity and profits.

Keywords: crime; corruption; peer effects; externalities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2008-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published - published in: Labour Economics, 2011, 18(3), 338-348

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp3328.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Learning unethical practices from a co-worker: The peer effect of Jose Canseco (2011)
Working Paper: Learning unethical practices from a co-worker: the peer effect of Jose Canseco (2010)
Working Paper: Learning Unethical Practices from a Co-worker: The Peer Effect of Jose Canseco (2007)
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:iza:izadps:dp3328

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().