The Corruption Gender Gap: Female Officials Fall into Temptation Less Often
New research by two Bocconi professors suggests that women may be significantly less corrupt than men. Women at different levels of government bureaucracy in both China and Italy are much less likely to be suspected of corruption and arrested for it.
These results are of clear policy relevance. They suggest an intriguing idea for fighting corruption in public office: assigning women bureaucrats to work at tasks involving higher risks of corruption, according to Bocconi Professors Francesco Decarolis (Economics) and Paolo Pinotti (Social and Political Sciences), who have just published the paper “Gender and Bureaucratic Corruption: Evidence from Two Countries” in The Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization in collaboration with Raymond Fisman (Boston University), Silvia Vannutelli (Northwestern University), and Yongxiang Wang (Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Shenzhen Finance Institute, Hong Kong).