National parking.

• Author: Howley, Kerry
• Position: Unpaid parking tickets corruption - Brief article

Before a belated crackdown in 2002, the city of New York was an open parking lot for diplomats: Pleading immunity, they were free to pluck tickets from their windshields with nary a thought of paying up. But as their paper trails demonstrate, not all foreigners double-park with the same enthusiasm.

In a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, economists Raymond Fisman of Columbia University and Edward Miguel of U.C.-Berkeley compare the corruption rankings of 146 nations to the number of unpaid parking tickets each country's diplomats accrued. They find that the worst violators came from states that rank...