Dishonesty in Developing Countries -What Can We Learn From Experiments?

This paper reviews the recent literature on cheating and corruption to demonstrate the value that experimental methods hold for studying dishonesty in developing countries. Emphasizing the diversity of experimental methods, the chapter highlights the contributions of laboratory and field experiments to the measurement of crosscountry differences and to the identification of select causes of corruption and cheating. This body of literature has provided evidence of the causal effects of social norms, institutions, group identity, and social status concerns. Moreover, the existing research has also delivered practical policy recommendations to ethics-related development problems.