Welcome back to the podcast, bribe, swindle, or steel. I'm Alexandra Rogge, and today we're talking about the intriguing idea that dishonesty is contagious.

Joining me is Federico Mazera. Federico is a lecturer in economics at the University of New South Wales and the

Resilient Democracy Lab in Sydney. He's the co-author, along with Giorgio Gullino, of the

working paper, Contagious Dishonesty, Corruption Scandals, and Supermarket Thaft. Federico, thank you

for joining me. Thank you for having me. This is really an intriguing idea, and I think our listeners are going to be fascinated

by what you've uncovered here.

Why don't you start by describing your study, how you went about it, and what you learned?

We were really interested in understanding what are the costs for society of corruption.

And there are some very classical costs that we always think about that are more economic and

financial, like the classical example is just somebody that has power, let's say a politician,

just instead of using the public money to some important

investment, they just keep it for themselves. Another possibility is that money is misused,

and instead of giving a specific project to the most deserving winner of this project,

they give it to their friends.

These are type of corruption that we always hear about in the news, and they clearly

have huge costs.

But we were interested in something a bit different, and it was more what are the societal,

cultural costs that corruption may have.

And this has been already thought about in the literature, and there are some, you know,

some interesting observations that you can make, for example, while looking at people in

the lab, that you see, for example, people coming from countries that tend to have more corruption,

they tend to behave, when, for example, faced coming from countries that tend to have more corruption, they tend to behave.

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