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A market for integrity An experiment on corruption in the education sector
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Corruption in the education sector is pervasive in many (developing) countries. We examine two interventions to fight corruption in education. The first is an increase of the fixed-wage of teachers. The second is the introduction of a piece-rate scheme that rewards teachers according to the number of students that they attract. We model these mechanisms and conduct a lab experiment in Colombia, a country riddled with corruption. After creating a culture of corruption, we introduce either intervention. The increase of the fixed-wage does not diminish bribery. The piece-rate scheme substantially reduces but does not eliminate bribery.
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A social norms approach can help practitioners design effective anti-corruption reforms. Social norms in communities, families, and organisations help explain why corruption persists. The threat of social sanctions for norm violations creates pressures on officials and citizens to sustain corrupt practices. Practitioners can use various methods to diagnose normative pressures in a given context, then use social norms strategies to relieve these pressures so that collective behaviour can change.
Main points
Collective behaviours like corruption are sustained by social norms, which are rooted in shared attitudes and beliefs. Understanding social normative pressures in a given context can help practitioners design interventions to relieve those pressures, allowing collective behaviour to change.
Four main types of social normative pressures help explain why corruption persists, and why standard anti-corruption initiatives often fail: sociability and kinship pressures, as well as horizontal and vertical pressures within organisations.
A stepwise process to diagnose social normative pressures can use tools such as a literature review, interviews, focus groups, vignettes, and others. Often the best choice is a combination of methods.
After recognising which normative forces sustain a given corrupt practice, practitioners should tailor their anti-corruption intervention accordingly. Sample strategies are presented for addressing each of the four main types of pressure, with suggestions for one or more methods to support each strategy.
Strategies should be deployed within specific contexts where there can be intensive engagement, such as within a community or sector. A locally grounded, locally led intervention is more likely to succeed and less likely to have unintended side effects.
Based on a survey conducted among 600 students at selected public universities in Lviv, one of the largest Ukrainian cities, this contribution explores the determinants of several forms of student academic dishonesty and provides insights as to which groups of students are more likely to engage in either monetary or nonmonetary corruption.
Corruption regularly makes front page headlines: public officials embezzling government monies, selling public offices, and trading bribes for favors to private companies generate public indignation and calls for reform. In Corruption: What Everyone Needs to Know®, renowned scholars Ray Fisman and Miriam A. Golden provide a deeper understanding of why corruption is so damaging politically, socially, and economically. Among the key questions examined are: is corruption the result of perverse economic incentives? Does it stem from differences in culture and tolerance for illicit acts of government officials? Why don't voters throw corrupt politicians out of office? Vivid examples from a wide range of countries and situations shed light on the causes of corruption, and how it can be combated.
Norms in the Wild takes a unique look at social norms, answering questions about diagnosis (how can we tell that a shared practice is a social norm?), measurement (how do we measure expectations and preferences?), and change (which tools can we adopt to effect norm change?). The theories developed in the book are brought to life by examining real-life cases of norm creation and abandonment, the rationale behind policy interventions, and how change can be spearheaded by various types of trendsetters, be they individuals, groups, or the media. By exploring how a range of problems, from poor sanitation to child marriage, can be addressed, the book shows how social norms can have a causal impact on collective behavior, and which interventions may succeed in creating new norms or abandoning harmful ones. In laying the theoretical groundwork for implementing social changes in a contextually sensitive and empirically based way, it also diagnoses why some less culturally attuned attempts to eliminate negative practices have failed.
Despite the focus placed on combating corruption over the last quarter-century, practical results have been disappointing. A small number of "success" stories cannot mask the fact that corruption continues to blight the lives of millions of citizens. This essay argues that part of the reason for the broad failure of anticorruption policies is that we have not specified clearly enough what we are seeking to address, and have paid insufficient attention to changes in how and where different forms of corruption operate in practice. Rather than sticking to unrealistic aspirations to "defeat" corruption, this essay argues that we should pay more attention to the positive promotion of integrity, supported by a better understanding of the drivers of individual behavior, particularly how these are more complex than suggested by the incentives-based literature. The final section of the essay outlines some practical measures we can take, underlining the need to focus reform efforts at both supra- and subnational levels in order to help move beyond what has become a sterile conversation about corruption.
A central argument for school choice is that parents can choose schools wisely. This principle may underlie why lottery-based school evaluations have almost always reported positive or zero achievement effects. This paper reports on a striking counterexample to these results. We use randomized lotteries to evaluate the Louisiana Scholarship Program, a voucher plan that provides public funds for disadvantaged students to attend private schools. LSP participation lowers math scores by 0.4 standard deviations and also reduces achievement in reading, science, and social studies. These effects may be due in part to selection of low-quality private schools into the program.
Prior studies have lent mixed evidence on the effectiveness of increasing government wages to reduce corruption. Based on a dynamic principal-agent model, this study uses cross-country data over ten years (1999–2008) and various statistical models to present updated evidence. Our analyses show that increasing the government relative wage by one unit (i.e., by the amount of the average manufacturing wage in a country) is associated with a decrease in the level of perceived corruption by 0.26 units. The effect appears to be particularly significant for non-OECD countries (where corruption is more rampant) or for countries with a relatively low government wage. The overall policy implication is: Whereas increasing government wages can help curtail corruption, solely relying on government wages to reduce corruption can be very costly. For example, to reduce the level of corruption in non-OECD countries to that in OECD countries, the government wage would have to be increased by about seven times.
