How Sensitive are Aspiring Bureaucrats to Dishonesty? An Experiment

Does the nature of the political principal in a bureaucratic system have an impact on the decision of civil servants to remain in the bureaucratic service, or exit to the private sector? Concurrently, is rent-seeking behaviour necessarily orthogonal to public service motivation in prospective civil servants? This paper utilizes a novel experimental design to investigate two primary outcomes of interest: whether the response to corrupt supervisor behaviour differs among public sector and private sector aspirants, and if pro-sociality or altruism is necessarily orthogonal to dishonest behaviour in public sector aspirants. The population of interest is Indian college graduates in two subject pools: either training for the Indian civil service examination or preparing for competitive admission tests for business school. While cultural mores are a recurrent theme in corruption studies, we investigate a hitherto-unstudied phenomenon: the impact that corrupt political supervisors may have on selection into and decisions to remain or exit the public sector, and whether the intersection of altruism and rent-seeking motivation is different for prospective civil servants compared to the private sector.