Abstract
While the role of cultural norms in determining corruption is well-explored in the empirical literature, the relationship between a specific aspect of culture, that is, individualism versus collectivism, and corruption is rather unexplored. This paper investigates the relationship between individualism/collectivism and corruption in a large cross-section of countries. To establish causality, the paper uses an index of historical prevalence of infectious diseases and a measure of genetic distance between the population in a country from that in the United States to instrument the individualism/collectivism variable. We find that more individualistic countries have lower levels of corruption (perception). This relationship is robust to the inclusion of a rich set of control variables and to the use of alternative measures of corruption.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 60-74 |
Number of pages | 15 |
Journal | Economic Papers |
Volume | 36 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Mar 2017 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2017 The Economic Society of Australia
Keywords
- collectivism
- corruption
- culture
- individualism