Institutions matter. Especially in football

My favourite economic cliche is any paper entitled "xxx matters". Governance, institutions, latitude, size - you name it, it's statistically significant in someone's regression.

Last weekend I watched Harvard thrash Yale in New Haven. I was surprised at our victory, but even more surprised at the good humour and complete absence of violence in the crowd before, during or after the game. If you have ever been to, or near to, a football (soccer) match in Europe, you will know what I mean. Any politician who laments the culture of violence in modern society should try putting on a Harvard shirt and walking through New Haven an hour after defeating the local team. We didn't get so much as a whistle from the locals.

So why are otherwise peaceful people like the Brits or Italians so eager to start a fight when it comes to football, while it's a family day out in New England? It can't be a greater police presence: they have them in Europe to. It can't be lack of alcohol: that was freely available at the pre-match tailgate. It can't be weapons: the US in general, and New Haven in particular, has lots of them. Maybe the huge geographic mobility of US society holds back the local pride and partisanship you find elsewhere. But when the Red Sox won the World Series a few weeks ago, I detected a fair bit of local pride at their victory parade.

I think there is a cultural norm at work here: football is a game for the family, so crowd violence is unacceptable. How this norm evolved is anyone's guess, but once it's there it's very hard to change. British police trying to deal with hooliganism in the 1980s had the same problem in reverse: the culture of violence had become an institution, an informally accepted way of doing things.

Social norms underpin economic behaviour wherever you look. Consider fare evasion on the subway. In London or New York, you have to pass through a fare barrier to get to the platform. In Paris, the barriers are as large and heavy as doors, to stop people from vaulting them. In law-abiding Vienna, there are ticket-stamping machines but no barriers. The city transport authority decided it would be cheaper to employ roving inspectors levying on-the-spot fines than build fare barriers in every station. Why do buses travel faster in Berlin than in Boston? Because passengers can use any of the doors to get on the bus, not just one - the driver takes it on trust that they have a ticket.

On a more serious level, business and government is a lot cheaper in high-trust societies. Imagine how much it would cost to send all your business mail by DHL or FedEx because the postal service is insecure. Try keeping a stash of $5 top-up cards in the petty cash box and giving them to your staff one at a time to make phone calls, because you can't get a telephone credit account. Or if you're a retailer, how about counting the inventory in your store at the end of every day to make sure nobody is stealing it?

Institutions matter, in sport as in everything else - we're just a little late to realize it.