Cultural Bias: Gymnasts, Judges, and Bilateral Trade Agreements
Bilateral trade agreements may enhance, or at least define, cultural understanding across countries. Possible bias from greater cultural understanding can take many forms. Using execution and difficulty scores from the 2009 World Gymnastics Championships, we find that gymnasts who are scored by judges from trading partner countries realize a greater return in terms of execution score for each bump in difficulty than do gymnasts from non trade partner countries.