The real costs of plagiarism: Russian governors, plagiarized PhD theses, and infrastructure in Russian regions

This paper investigates whether politicians who have plagiarized their PhD dissertations perform worse in running their polities than those who have not committed plagiarism. We look at the Russian regional governors and document that a substantial portion of them have plagiarized PhD theses. We find a negative association between plagiarized PhD of a governor and development of infrastructure (specifically, housing construction and spread of broadband Internet) in a region, controlling for other region-level characteristics potentially affecting infrastructural development. We argue that in the Russian context, a plagiarized PhD thesis is likely to indicate that a governor both is inclined to dishonest behavior and possesses poor managerial capabilities, which should have a particularly negative effect on the performance of their regions in terms of the development of infrastructure.