The aim of this paper is to explore the relationship between intelligence and economic and financial crimes. For this purpose, we use a cross-sectional sample of 182 countries for the time span of 2012–2017. Our research provides empirical evidence on the existence of a significant impact of intelligence upon economic and financial crimes. When we analyze the entire sample, we find that intelligent people are more prone to comply with the law and thus increase the efficiency of implementing government policies to reduce economic and financial crimes. However, when we conduct our analysis among the two subgroups of high- and low-income countries, different results are obtained. For high-income countries, we obtain evidence of a positive coefficient for the impact of intelligence on economic and financial crimes, meaning that increased intellectual capacities of people from these countries, including high professional knowledge and skills, are used to break the traditional technology in order to get illegal benefits. Our results conducted for the low-income countries' subsample do not support intelligence as being a determining factor for economic and financial crimes; in these countries, other determinants are more important for engaging in such activities. Our study may have important implications for the policymakers who must acknowledge that various policies in the field of economic and financial crimes need to be differentially adopted depending on the level of development of each country, which offers different ways of involvement in such crimes, related to the level of people's intelligence.
