Corrupt at home, corrupt abroad?

"...even when stationed thousands of miles away, diplomats behave in a manner highly reminiscent of officials in home country..."

Do diplomats bring the corruption "culture" of their home countries when they move to New York City? There seems to be evidence that the answer is "yes", at least according to Ray Fisman and Edward Miguel in their their paper on corruption (via PSD) using data on parking violations committed by thousands of diplomats in New York City. The study finds that diplomats from countries highly perceived as corrupt (using the Corruption Perception Index created by Transparency International) also have significantly higher number of unpaid parking tickets.

Why parking tickets? Scarcity of parking spots in NYC is legendary and each diplomatic mission to the UN is only given two spots for their cars, regardless of the size of the mission. Cars with diplomatic license plates can be ticketed for parking violations but the diplomats who are the registrants of the cars are immune from any legal punishment if they choose not to pay the tickets. Economic prediction then would tell us that no one will make any payment since everyone can get away with it. One can then argue, as did the authors, that the number of unpaid parking violations represents the revealed preference on "corruption" of the diplomats (or the mission). And guess what, apparently diplomats who come from countries perceived as least corrupt tend to have the least number or even zero unpaid parking tickets. On the other hand, diplomats from countries high in the CPI ranking revealed their preference to, er.. not paying the tickets.

[Quiz: How many of you are actually familiar with our own traffic infraction procedures? Do you know about the blue and red forms? Here's an amusing "how-to" guide to do it the right way - and by that I mean the least corrupt way, not necessarily the cheapest way.]

So what country has the highest number of parking violations per diplomat between November '97 to November '02? It's Kuwait, with 246 unpaid parking tickets per year per diplomat (they have 9 diplomats in 1998). You would think after what the US did for them in Desert Storm....

At the other end of the list is Turkey, with zero unpaid parking tickets for their 25 diplomats (remember zero means either they committed no violations or they paid for all the violations they made). There are around 20 other countries also with zeroes but Japan deserves a mention because they have 47 diplomats stationed in New York.

Okay, what about Indonesia? We're number 24 (pop the champagne!), with an annual average of 36 unpaid parking tickets per diplomat. Considering there were 25 Indonesian diplomats in New York City in 1998, the number suggests that our diplomats racked up around 900 unpaid parking tickets per year (Three cars get ticketed every single day? One car three times a day? Any helpful readers from NYC? Just curious).

In the paper the authors control for various things including the size of the mission, the country's per capita income, as well as the number of cars registered per mission, but the strong correlations between corruption in home country and the number of unpaid tickets are still there. They went as far as to conclude:

"This strongly suggests that one's background and experiences, what we might call culture, does indeed contribute to bad behavior"

Earlier, we were having a discussion on corruption, provoked by a.p.'s post about whether corruption is necessarily a bad thing. I and others thought that a lot of things a.p. were alluding to in that post were probably only relevant in a second-best world. Norm and culture didn't really enter our discussion, although Treespotter did suggest that disregard for law and order in one area may spill to other areas. Now this paper is saying that diplomats seem to bring their home countries' norms along with them when they come to New York City.

Another interesting result of the paper is that diplomats from countries whose population have unfavorable attitudes toward the US (based on the Pew Index) also tend to have significantly higher number of parking violations; a result interpreted by the authors as evidence that sentiments play a role in the decision to pay the tickets. Proportion of Muslim population does not appear to be significantly related to unpaid parking violations, just in case you are curious about that. I was.

Back on the domestic front, there's a number of important empirical papers on corruption written by Ari Kuncoro of LPEM/FEUI. One of those, a paper on the relationship between bribes and regulation at the local level has been published in the BIES. He has several other papers, some of them you can find at the NBER working paper website. And of course the paper by Ben Olken on corruption in road building also worth a mention.

empirical corruption