Cultures of Illegality in the National Hockey League

When people commit illegal acts, are they influenced by the wider culture of illegality around them, or do personal incentives matter most? If someone experiences a more pronounced culture of illegality, whether he increases his illegality depends greatly on his historical involvement with illegality and how his wealth also changes. The National Hockey League provides a useful setting for empirical analysis of these issues. Using a constructed panel data set, which tracks player behavior on a game-by-game basis over the course of a season, we examine how various aspects of the wider culture of illegality affect individual illegality. We also take advantage of what amounts to a natural experiment in exogenous cultural change, by examining the behavior of players traded during the season under analysis. The empirical results are consistent with the economic model of crime, but cultural factors generally appear less influential and robust than individual-level incentives.