A Few Bad Apples? Academic Dishonesty, Political Selection, and Institutional Performance in China

Honesty is perceived as fundamental to societal functioning, motivating education systems worldwide to enforce strict oversight and heavy penalties for dishonest behavior. Yet much academic misconduct remains unexposed, and its broader consequences are further obscured by the sorting of individuals into careers based on probity. Applying advanced plagiarism-detection algorithms to half a million publicly available graduate dissertations in China, we uncover hidden misconduct and validate it against incentivized measures of honesty. Linking plagiarism records to rich administrative data, we document four main findings. First, plagiarism is pervasive and predicts adverse political selection: plagiarists are more likely to enter and advance in the public sector. Second, plagiarists perform worse when holding power: focusing on the judiciary and exploiting quasi-random case assignments, we find that judges with plagiarism histories issue more preferential rulings and attract a greater number of appeals— effects partly mitigated by trial livestreaming. Third, plagiarizing judges generate spillovers onto other judges and lawyers. Fourth, exploiting the staggered adoption of detection tools, we demonstrate that enforcing academic integrity leads to modest improvements in future professional conduct.