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

Eric Gould and Todd Kaplan

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

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, a star baseball player in the late 1980’s and 1990’s, affected the performance of his teammates by introducing them to steroids. Using panel data, 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. Furthermore, the positive effect 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 findings may be relevant to many workplaces where competitive pressures create incentives to adopt unethical means to boost productivity and profits. Our analysis leads to several potential policy implications designed to reduce the spread of unethical behavior among workers.

Keywords: Peer Effects; Corruption; Crime; Externalities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-08-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/24232/1/MPRA_paper_24232.pdf original version (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 (2008)
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:pra:mprapa:24232

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().