2013 Articles

Corruption and Foreign Education

Ferreras, Leticia

Despite the increasing amount of public and private resources dedicated to promoting foreign education, there is little empirical evidence on the influence that foreign-educated individuals have on reducing corruption in their home countries. Using a unique dataset on international student mobility since 1998, this study shows that increasing the number of students that receive tertiary education abroad, can lead to less corruption in their home countries. These results are robust to several model specifications as well as to the inclusion of control variables, including GDP per capita, economic freedom, and share of population that receives tertiary education.