Tyler Cohen and Dan Drezner look at a paper by Ray Fisman and Edward Miguel of the National Bureau of Economic Research entitled “Cultures of Corruption: Evidence from Diplomatic Parking Tickets” [PDF].
Cohen sums up the research question thusly: “During a period of diplomatic parking immunity, the average Kuwaiti diplomat to the United Nations racked up 246 parking violations. No Swedish diplomat had any parking violations. This paper explores how that might possibly be the case.”
The basic findings are that there is a “tremendous persistence in corruption norms” and that “officials from countries that survey evidence indicates have less favorable popular views of the United States commit significantly more parking violations.” I suspect, however, that these two findings are essentially the same.
