Permissiveness toward illegal actions in Uruguay Are Belief in God, income and education relevant?

Natalia Melgar and Maximo Rossi
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Natalia Melgar: Departamento de Economía, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de la República

No 1009, Documentos de Trabajo (working papers) from Department of Economics - dECON

Abstract: This paper assesses the willingness to justify illegal actions and whether this attitude has changed between 1995 and 2005. Our dataset are 1995 and 2005 waves of World Values Survey. Permissiveness or the willingness to justify illegal actions is a cultural phenomenon that can be defined in several ways depending on societies and people. Hence, we consider firstly the four dimensions available (accepting bribes, evading taxes, etc.), and we estimated multivariate regressions. Secondly, from principal component analysis, we generated a new variable "willingness to justify” as a weighted average of the previous dimensions. We find that socio-demographic variables such as age and education reduce permissiveness, political affiliation with the Center hikes it, being employed full time reduces permissiveness while income has the opposite effect, even when religiosity reduces permissiveness, beliefs in God do not matter, living in Montevideo reduces permissiveness and finally, between 1995 and 2005 the permissiveness among Uruguayans has changed, the model show that the probability of being permissive is significantly higher in 2005 than in 1995

Keywords: permissiveness; illegal action; microeconomic behavior; Uruguay. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 D01 D73 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 14 pages
Date: 2009-07
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ude:wpaper:1009

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