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Does Economics Make Politicians Corrupt? Empirical Evidence from the U nited S tates C ongress
Author(s) -
Ruske René
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
kyklos
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.766
H-Index - 58
eISSN - 1467-6435
pISSN - 0023-5962
DOI - 10.1111/kykl.12082
Subject(s) - proxy (statistics) , selfishness , economics , language change , opportunity cost , microeconomics , social psychology , psychology , art , literature , machine learning , computer science
Summary The present article analyzes the differences between economists and non‐economists with respect to observed corruption behavior used as a proxy for selfishness. For this purpose, I analyzed real world data of relating to the 109 th –111 th US C ongress between 2005 and 2009, including 695 representatives and senators. I show that those who hold a degree in economics are significantly more prone to corruption than ‘non‐economists’. These findings hence support the widespread, but controversial hypothesis in the ‘economist vs. non‐economist literature’ that economists lack what F rey and M eier (2004) call ‘social behavior’. Moreover, by using real world data, these findings overcome the lack of external validity, which impact on the (low cost) experiments and surveys to date.