The Intergenerational Transmission of Attitudes Toward Corruption

Abstract: What is the role of attitudes in corruption? This study focuses on one aspect of this question, by investigating the capacity of attitudes to exist, persist, and vary independently of institutions. To isolate attitudes from institutions, I compare individuals who share an institutional environment, but whose ancestors may have originated in different countries. The analysis shows that a proxy measure of past overall attitudes toward corruption in the country of ancestry explains substantial variation in attitudes toward corruption across the individuals in the sample, furnishing strong evidence of intergenerational transmission. The findings are not driven by discrimination of certain ancestry groups, selection of ancestries into economic activities, local corruption, or inherited human capital, and they hold for two separate measures of attitudes from different data sources.