Do Business Students make Good Citizens?

Stephan Meier and Bruno Frey

No 148, IEW - Working Papers from Institute for Empirical Research in Economics - University of Zurich

Abstract: Business students are portrayed as behaving too egoistically. The critics call for more social responsibility and good citizenship behavior on the part of business students. We present evidence of pro-social behavior in business students. Every student at the University of Zurich has to decide each semester whether he/she wants to contribute to two social funds administrated by the University. With this large panel data set, we can analyze whether business students indeed behave less pro-socially than other students. Two specific hypotheses are tested: do students select into business studies or does the training in business studies indoctrinate students in a negative way? The evidence suggests that there may be a selection effect going on. Therefore, economics education does not change the citizenship behavior of business students.

Keywords: business students; public good; pro-social behavior; education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 A20 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Do Business Students Make Good Citizens? (2004)
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