Park where you please in New York- Reflective of corruption

What makes officials corrupt?

Disentangling law and culture is a tricky business, but a pair of economists have come up with an ingenious way to do it: studying the frequency of parking violations committed by diplomats in New York City. Since, as their study reports, there is "essentially zero legal enforcement of diplomatic parking violations," the authors hypothesized that any cross-national variation in parking-violation rates should flow from culture alone. And sure enough, diplomats from countries with high levels of corruption were significantly more likely to incur parking tickets, suggesting that cultural factors rather than legal norms drive a great deal of official misconduct.

More interestingly, the number of parking tickets of diplomats from corrupt countries increased with their stay in New York, implying that the diplomats took some time to make sure they weren't going to get caught, then went all out. So, a deterrent would lower corruption, even if it can't stop it.