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Replication Data for: Corruption as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Costa Rica

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Title Replication Data for: Corruption as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Costa Rica
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/8GEYKS
 
Creator Corbacho, Ana
Gingerich, Daniel
Oliveros, Virginia
Ruiz-Vega, Mauricio
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description An influential literature argues that corruption behaves as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Its central claim is that the individual returns to corruption are a function of the perceived corruptibility of the other members of society. Empirically, this implies that if one were to exogenously increase beliefs about societal levels of corruption, willingness to engage in corruption should also increase. We evaluate this implication by utilizing an information experiment embedded in a large-scale household survey recently conducted in the Gran Área Metropolitana of Costa Rica. Changes in beliefs about corruption were induced via the random assignment of an informational display depicting the increasing percentage of Costa Ricans who have personally witnessed an act of corruption. Consistent with the self-fulfilling prophecy hypothesis, we find that internalizing the information from the display on average increased the probability that a respondent would be willing to bribe to a police officer by approximately 0.05 to 0.10.
 
Subject Social Sciences
Corruption
Spillover effects
Surveys
Sensitive question techniques
 
Contributor Gingerich, Daniel