Headquarters of the United Nations

In the marvelous book "The Weirdest People in the World" of Joseph Henrich, the author mentions a remarkable study related to the diplomats of the United Nations, working in this building. The diplomats of 149 countries were immune from having to pay parking tickets until November 2002. Between 1997 and 2002, there were 150,000 unpaid parking tickets, worth about $18 million in fines. Two economists, Ted Miguel and Ray Fisman, started to investigate this, and started to check the countries the diplomats were coming from and their ticket score. Diplomats of the UK, Sweden, Canada, Australia and a few other countries got a total of zero tickets. But the high score was for Egypt, Chad and Bulgaria. They found out that the higher the international corruption index for a delegation's home country was, the more tickets those delegations accumulated. 

Pascal Brackman