Sustaining Honesty in Public Service: The Role of Selection

Abstract

We study the role of self-selection into public service in sustaining honesty in the public sector. Focusing on the world’s least corrupt country, Denmark, we use a survey experiment to document strong self-selection of more honest individuals into public service. This result differs sharply from existing findings from more corrupt settings. Differences in pro-social versus pecuniary motivation appear central to the observed selection pattern. Dishonest individuals are more pecuniarily motivated and self-select out of public service into higher-paying private sector jobs. Accordingly, we find that increasing public sector wages would attract more dishonest candidates to public service in Denmark. (JEL D73, H83, J31, J45)

Trust the Police? Self-Selection of Motivated Agents into the German Police Force

“…Empirical papers studying self-selection have highlighted the effects of different incentive schemes both in the lab (Niederle and Vesterlund 2007;Eriksson, Teyssier, and Villeval 2009;Dohmen and Falk 2011) and in the field (Dohmen and Falk 2010;Buser, Niederle, and Oosterbeek 2014;Dal Bó, Finan, and Rossi 2013;Ashraf, Bandiera, and Lee 2018). Carpenter and Myers (2010) and Hanna and Wang (2017) as well as Barfort et al (2016) analyze the role of altruism and (dis-) honesty in selection into public service, using samples of US volunteer firefighters and university students in India and Denmark, respectively. While these studies use experimental games like we do to measure motivation, the results are based on active volunteers or hypothetical job preferences only, thus making it difficult, for reasons explained above, to pin down actual self-selection.…”

Character or context: What explains behavioural dishonesty in low-income countries?

“…The idea is that differences in such deep factors might then account for seemingly large differences in (average) tendencies to violate rules across different societies (Gächter and Schulz 2016) as well as systematic differences across individuals in the same society. Several studies indicate that women behave differently to men when it comes to (dis)honesty, with many finding that women are more honest (Azar et al 2013;Barfort et al 2019;Bucciol et al 2013;Fosgaard et al 2013;Hanna and Wang 2017). However, this does not seem to be an 'iron law'-a small number of other studies find women to be more tolerant of corruption or dishonesty (Alatas et al 2009), indicating that gender differences in dishonesty may reflect other cultural norms, as well as prior exposure to opportunities to cheat.…”

“…A number of studies suggest cheating is correlated with occupational preferences, but in complex ways. For example, Hanna and Wang (2017) find that students in India who would prefer to work in the public sector tend to cheat more (on a dice game adapted from Fischbacher and Föllmi-Heusi 2013); but Barfort et al (2019) find the opposite result among Danish students (in law, economics, and political science).…”

“…Third, we ran a modified version of the dice-in-cup game, introduced by Fischbacher and Föllmi-Heusi (2013) and used in a range of studies (e.g., Barfort et al 2019;Hanna and Wang 2017). 8 As implemented in our case, for each of 40 separate rolls of a single dice, split into four rounds of 10 rolls, participants were first instructed to guess the expected outcome of the roll.…”

“…A growing literature seeks to understand how (dis)honesty varies between and across populations. While laboratory experiments have identified various intrinsic drivers of behavioural dishonesty (e.g., Barfort et al 2019;Fosgaard 2019;Gächter and Schulz 2016;Hanna and Wang 2017), few studies have sought to disentangle how intrinsic and extrinsic factors might interact in real-world situations, where anonymity is rarely complete and environmental distractions vary. Furthermore, the vast majority of studies pertain to high-income countries, and many of these rely on responses from (economics) students who may have some prior awareness of behavioural games (see Fosgaard 2020).…”