Policy makers use several international indices that characterize countries according to the quality of their institutions. However, no effort has been made to study how the honesty of citizens varies across countries. This paper explores the honesty among citizens across 16 countries with 1440 participants. We employ a very simple task where participants face a trade-off between the joy of eating a fine chocolate and the disutility of having a threatened self-concept because of lying. Despite the incentives to cheat, we find that individuals are mostly honest. Further, international indices that are indicative of institutional honesty are completely uncorrelated with citizens' honesty for our sample countries.

a b s t r a c tPolicy makers use several international indices that characterize countries according to the quality of their institutions. However, no effort has been made to study how the honesty of citizens varies across countries. This paper explores the honesty among citizens across 16 countries with 1440 participants. We employ a very simple task where participants face a trade-off between the joy of eating a fine chocolate and the disutility of having a threatened self-concept because of lying. Despite the incentives to cheat, we find that individuals are mostly honest. Further, international indices that are indicative of institutional honesty are completely uncorrelated with citizens' honesty for our sample countries.

Political decision-making involves the presentation of policy options from opposing points of view and in different lights. We test whether economic policy decisions are subject to equivalency framing by presenting survey participants with binary risky-choice decisions in hypothetical policy scenarios. Potentially mediating influences of expertise on the framing effect are explored using responses of students and professionals. Expertise is thereby defined in line with common education and work experience criteria in the recruitment of public officials. We mostly find unidirectional framing effects in the economic policy scenarios and a similar susceptibility of respondents with different levels of expertise. A logistic regression of the expertise variables on the choice between certain and risky options reveals only the frame to have a systematically significant effect across scenarios. The results indicate that expertise may not necessarily help to make better policy choices under risk, if the available options are framed differently.JEL classifications: D73; D81