Is Corruption a Greater Evil than Sin?

Cigdem Tunali and Laurent Weill

Working Papers of LaRGE Research Center from Laboratoire de Recherche en Gestion et Economie (LaRGE), Université de Strasbourg

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to provide new evidence on the relation between religion and attitude toward corruption at the individual level. We use World Values Survey data covering 59 countries during the period 2010-2014 to examine if religiosity and religious denominations are associated with attitude toward corruption. We find that religious people are more averse to corruption, supporting the view that religiosity favors honest behavior. Attitudes toward corruption differ across religious denominations. Protestantism and Hinduism are associated with greater aversion to corruption than Atheism, while other religious denominations do not have clear difference. This conclusion accords with the view that hierarchical religions favor greater tolerance to corruption than individualistic religions. Additional estimations on groups of countries with different dominant religions and on multi-religious countries show however that the relation between religious denomination and tolerance to corruption can vary with the religious environment of the country.

Keywords: religion; corruption. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H11 K42 Z12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe and nep-law
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lar:wpaper:2019-05

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