Does Economics Make Politicians Corrupt? Empirical Evidence from the United States Congress
分析了2005-2009年美国国会695名议员的数据，发现拥有经济学学位的议员比非经济学背景的议员更易腐败，支持了经济学家缺乏社会行为的假说。
Summary The present article analyzes the differences between economists and non‐economists with respect to observed corruption behavior used as a proxy for selfishness. For this purpose, I analyzed real world data of relating to the 109 th –111 th US C ongress between 2005 and 2009, including 695 representatives and senators. I show that those who hold a degree in economics are significantly more prone to corruption than ‘non‐economists’. These findings hence support the widespread, but controversial hypothesis in the ‘economist vs. non‐economist literature’ that economists lack what F rey and M eier (2004) call ‘social behavior’. Moreover, by using real world data, these findings overcome the lack of external validity, which impact on the (low cost) experiments and surveys to date.