Adam Smith Business School

"When Teachers Break the Rules: Imitation and Reciprocity in the Transmission of Ethical Behaviour and the Role of Community Structure" (by Victor Lavy and Moses Shayo)

Professor Victor Lavy, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Thursday, 29 January. 15:00
Room 386AB Adam Smith Business School

Abstract

We study how teachers' rule violations in grading affect students' ethical behaviour, using administrative data that track teacher violations and subsequent student cheating on high-stakes exams. Exploiting within-student variation in exposure to different teachers, we find that students are significantly more likely to cheat when teachers break the rules to their detriment (giving exceptionally low internal grades). However, when teachers break the rules in their favour (e.g., by inflating internal grades), the response varies across community contexts. In homogeneous communities, students respond to favourable teacher violations by cheating less, consistent with reciprocal norms. In heterogeneous communities, both types of teacher violations increase student cheating. This pattern holds across multiple measures of community homogeneity, including surname concentration and residential clustering. Survey measures of mutual support, trust, and reciprocity between students and teachers support this pattern.

Bio

Victor Lavy is Professor of Economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Warwick, England. He was also a Chaired Professor of Economics at Royal Holloway, University of London, 2006-2011. He served as a senior staff member in the research department of the World Bank from 1983 to 1985 and from 1989 to 1991, and as a senior consultant before and after these periods. He was the chair of the economics department at the Hebrew University from 1995 to 1998 and Director of the Falk Research Institute in Jerusalem from 1998 to 2001.

He studied Economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the University of Chicago, and after graduation, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. He was a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania, MIT, Boston University, Stanford University, and the Hoover Institute.

His research is focused on labour economics, economics of education, economics of the family, and development economics. He published numerous research papers in all the top journals in economics, including American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Econometrica, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of the European Economic Association, American Economic Journals: Applied Economics, the Economic Journal, and in top field journals.

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First published: 14 January 2026