Cultural Bias: Gymnasts, Judges, and Bilateral Trade Agreements

Bilateral trade agreements may arise from and enhance shared cultural norms across countries. Greater cultural understanding or similarities may be revealed through a number of avenues. We investigate one particular avenue: the judging of gymnastic performances. Using execution and difficulty scores from the 2009 World Gymnastics Championships, we find that gymnasts realize a greater return in terms of execution score for each bump in difficulty when the home countries of the judge and the athlete share a bilateral trade agreement.