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

This paper examines the issue of whether workers learn productive skills from their coworkers, 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.

Interesting stuff. The authors accounted for the most obvious possibility that occurred to me immediately (several players having an inordinate impact on the results), and still found evidence of a performance boost post-Canseco.