Does religion matter to corruption? Evidence from China |
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| Institution: | 1. School of Economics & Business Administration, Chongqing University, Chongqing 400030, PR China;2. School of Management, Southwest University of Political Science and Law, Chongqing 401120, PR China;1. School of Economics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Luoyu Road 1037#, Wuhan 430074, Hubei, China;2. School of Economics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China;3. School of Banking and Finance, University of International Business and Economic, China;1. China Center for Economic Studies and Research Institute of Chinse Economy, Fudan University; Shanghai Institute of International Finance and Economics, 600 Guoquan Road, Shanghai, China;2. Department of Economics, Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, 1st Changan Avenue, Dongcheng, Beijing, China;1. Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania, 133 S. 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, United States of America;2. China Center for Internet Economy Research, Central University of Finance and Economics, Beijing, 100081, China;3. National Bureau of Economic Research, United States of America;4. Department of Applied Economics, Guanghua School of Management, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China;5. School of Entrepreneurship and Management, ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai 201210, China |
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| Abstract: | There is a growing interest in understanding how religion affects corruption. Using provincial-level panel data from 1998 to 2009, this paper investigates the effect of religious beliefs on bureaucratic corruption in China. The empirical results show that, bureaucratic corruption is negatively associated with local religious heritage, implying that religious culture plays a positive role in restraining official's corruption since religion has influence on political preference and work ethic. We also find that the negative association between religion and corruption is weaker in provinces with stronger law enforcement, which identifies the substitution effect between religious ethic and legal supervision in curbing corruption. Our findings also reveal that, among the different religions, the anti-corruption effects of China's native religions (i.e., Taoism and Buddhism) are more significant than those of foreign religions (i.e., Christianity and Islam). These conclusions are consistent and robust to various measures of main variables and a variety of robustness checks. Given the very few studies and limited data resources in the context of China, this paper as a tentative study provides new evidences of the relationship between religion and corruption. |
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