Highlight corruption, norms, and legal enforcement 1023
(1968), Levitt (1997, 2004), Di Tella and Schargrodsky (2003), and others on the responsiveness of crime to punishment. In our setting, the impact of legal enforcement appears larger than the effects of var- iation in cultural norms across countries.
The main theoretical implication of these empirical patterns, taken together, is that both cultural norms and legal enforcement play key roles in government officials’ corruption decisions. They suggest that both factors should be taken seriously in debates about the causes of corruption and the policy measures to combat it.
Since the parking violations data exist at the individual level for all UN mission diplomats present in New York City (numbering roughly 1,700 at the start of our study period), we can examine how individual behavior evolves over time. For diplomats from high-corruption coun- tries of origin, a model of convergence to U.S. corruption norms would (presumably) predict a decline in the rate of parking violations over time, as tenure in the United States increases. By contrast, a model of convergence to the “zero-enforcement” norm discussed above would imply an increase in violations over time, particularly for officials from low-corruption countries. We find evidence that the frequency of vio- lations increases with tenure in New York City and that these increases are particularly large for diplomats from low-corruption countries, sug- gesting that there is partial convergence to the zero-enforcement norm over time.
Beyond contributing to the large literature in economics on the de- terminants of legal compliance, our work is part of a growing body of research on the importance of cultural background in explaining in- dividual behavior. Much of this work compares the outcomes and actions of immigrant groups from different countries. For example, Borjas (2000) finds that home country attributes are predictive of immigrants’ economic achievement. In the social domain, Fernandez and Fogli (2006) show that fertility rates among Americans are correlated with fertility in their countries of ancestry. In work also related to ours, Ichino and Maggi (2000) study absenteeism and misconduct of employees at an Italian bank and find that region of origin within Italy predicts shirking.
We also seek to contribute to the growing empirical literature on corruption specifically. Other recent empirical research emphasizes the importance of developing corruption measures based on real-world de- cisions rather than survey responses; see Reinikka and Svensson (2004) and Olken (2006) for discussions. This article is the first to our knowl- edge to develop a revealed preference measure of corruption that is comparable across countries. Finally, the importance of norm compli- ance and nonselfish behavior has been documented in the laboratory
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1024 journal of political economy
(see, e.g., Ledyard 1995), and more recently Levitt (2006) provides evidence on norms of nonselfish behavior in the field.
The rest of the article proceeds as follows: Section II describes the diplomatic parking situation in New York City and the violations data, Section III discusses the rest of the data set, Section IV contains the empirical results, and Section V presents conclusions.