Gender and Corruption: Lessons from Laboratory Corruption Experiments

Reliable microdata on corrupt behavior are hard to obtain in the field, and available field data are hard to interpret. Laboratory corruption experiments have therefore recently gained in popularity, and those that shed light on gender effects are surveyed in this article. The tentative main result is this: if women are involved in a potentially corrupt transaction, it is more likely to fail. The reason is not that women are intrinsically more honest, but that they are more opportunistic when they have the chance to break an implicitly corrupt contract and less engaged in retaliating nonperformance. The survey closes with tentative implications for development policy.