Education and the Quality of Government

Juan Botero, Alejandro Ponce and Andrei Shleifer

No 18119, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Generally speaking, better educated countries have better governments, an empirical regularity that holds in both dictatorships and democracies. We suggest that a possible reason for this fact is that educated people are more likely to complain about misconduct by government officials, so that, even when each complaint is unlikely to succeed, more frequent complaints encourage better behavior from officials. Newly assembled individual-level survey data from the World Justice Project show that, within countries, better educated people are more likely to report official misconduct. The results are confirmed using other survey data on reporting crime and corruption. Citizen complaints might thus be an operative mechanism that explains the link between education and the quality of government.

JEL-codes: D73 D78 O43 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-edu, nep-lab, nep-pbe and nep-pol
Note: PE POL
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (28)

Published as Juan Botero, Alejandro Ponce, and Andrei Shleifer Journal of Law and Economics Vol. 56, No. 4 (November 2013), pp. 959-996 Published by: The University of Chicago Press

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w18119.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:18119

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w18119

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().