That’s what economists Ray Fisman and Edward Miguel did. In what The Undercover Economist author Tim Harford called “a flash of inspiration,” Fisman and Miguel decided to see which countries’ diplomats at the United Nations in New York racked up the most parking tickets. They reasoned that, because diplomatic immunity put the diplomats in a consequence-free environment, it would be a great experiment to measure personal morality on a country-by-country basis. 

Harford interpreted the results during an interview on the radio program Marketplace yesterday:

I’m afraid it’s not good news for the view that all humans are created equal. Because ambassadors from the countries that habitually come up as most corrupt, like Chad or Bangladesh, they were also the ambassadors who were committing the largest number of parking violations. So, Chad and Bangladesh, which had very small embassies, not very many staff, they still managed to rack up over eight years 2,500 parking violations. Which is a lot. Then you compare them with, say, the Scandinavians who always come down very low on the scale of corruption . . . All the Scandinavian embassies, which were much bigger, between them managed to rack up 12 parking violations. And most of those were by a criminal mastermind from Finland. So there does seem to be a difference in the attitudes of people from different countries towards the law.

So what should we take from this? More from Harford:

There’s a depressing conclusion and there’s an optimistic conclusion. The depressing conclusion is there’s nothing you can do about corruption because, well, you know, these guys from Chad and Bangladesh, they’re just corrupt. That’s what a lot of people, I think, have read this paper and thought that. But I take a different view. Because there’s a kicker right at the end of the paper, which is what happened when the law changed. There was the Clinton-Schumer Amendment in 2002. It meant that, OK, you couldn’t fine people for committing parking violations. But you could, and you would, tow their cars. And you would actually deduct the parking fines from each country’s allocation of foreign aid. So they really started to take a stand on this.

And guess what? Personal morality matters, but enforcing the law matters, too. Because when the amendment was passed, all of these parking violations, by all of these ambassadors, immediately fell by 90 percent. So there is hope for improving the world and stamping out corruption after all.

Fisman and Miguel’s paper can be found here as a PDF.