Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
187,862
result(s) for
"Government corruption"
Sort by:
Corruption as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Costa Rica
An influential literature argues that corruption behaves as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Its central claim is that the individual returns to corruption are a function of the perceived corruptibility of the other members of society. Empirically, this implies that if one were to exogenously increase beliefs about societal levels of corruption, willingness to engage in corruption should also increase. We evaluate this implication by utilizing an information experiment embedded in a large-scale household survey recently conducted in the Gran Área Metropolitana of Costa Rica. Changes in beliefs about corruption were induced via the random assignment of an informational display depicting the increasing percentage of Costa Ricans who have personally witnessed an act of corruption. Consistent with the self-fulfilling prophecy hypothesis, we find that internalizing the information from the display on average increased the probability that a respondent would be willing to bribe a police officer by approximately .05 to .10.
Journal Article
Does corruption ever help entrepreneurship?
The current literature contains mixed results regarding the impact of corruption on entrepreneurship and economic growth. In this paper, we examine a much larger set of countries and time periods to attempt to gain insights into this relationship. In particular, the central question is whether corruption can compensate for a bad business climate. Our results are clear; corruption hurts entrepreneurship. The impact is smaller, but remains negative, when business climates are bad. This is in contrast to previous literature that suggests corruption may increase entrepreneurship under a bad business climate. We find corruption never improves entrepreneurship; it simply hurts less when business climates are not conducive to growth in the first place.
Journal Article
Does Corruption Information Inspire the Fight or Quash the Hope? A Field Experiment in Mexico on Voter Turnout, Choice, and Party Identification
Retrospective voting models assume that offering more information to voters about their incumbents’ performance strengthens electoral accountability. However, it is unclear whether incumbent corruption information translates into higher political participation and increased support for challengers. We provide experimental evidence that such information not only decreases incumbent party support in local elections in Mexico, but also decreases voter turnout and support for the challenger party, as well as erodes partisan attachments. While information clearly is necessary to improve accountability, corruption information is not sufficient because voters may respond to it by withdrawing from the political process. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings for studies of voting behavior.
Journal Article
The Political Resource Curse
This paper studies the effect of additional government revenues on political corruption and on the quality of politicians, both with theory and data. The theory is based on a political agency model with career concerns and endogenous entry of candidates. The data refer to Brazil, where federal transfers to municipal governments change exogenously at given population thresholds, allowing us to implement a regression discontinuity design. The empirical evidence shows that larger transfers increase observed corruption and reduce the average education of candidates for mayor. These and other more specific empirical results are in line with the predictions of the theory.
Journal Article
Organizing Leviathan : politicians, bureaucrats and the making of good government
\"Why are some countries less corrupt and better governed than others? Challenging conventional explanations on the remarkable differences in quality of government across the globe, this book argues that the organization of bureaucracy is an often overlooked but critical factor. Countries where merit-recruited employees occupy public bureaucracies perform better than those where public employees owe their post to political connections. The book provides a coherent theory of why, and ample evidence showing that meritocratic bureaucracies are conducive to lower levels of corruption, higher government effectiveness, and more flexibility to adopt modernizing reforms. Data comes from both a novel dataset on the bureaucratic structures of over 100 countries as well as from narratives of particular countries, with a special focus on the relationship between politicians and bureaucrats in Spain and Sweden. A notable contribution to the literature in comparative politics and public policy on good governance, and to corruption studies more widely\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Electoral Accountability and Corruption: Evidence from the Audits of Local Governments
We show that political institutions affect corruption levels. We use audit reports in Brazil to construct new measures of political corruption in local governments and test whether electoral accountability affects the corruption practices of incumbent politicians. We find significantly less corruption in municipalities where mayors can get reelected. Mayors with reelection incentives misappropriate 27 percent fewer resources than mayors without reelection incentives. These effects are more pronounced among municipalities with less access to information and where the likelihood of judicial punishment is lower. Overall our findings suggest that electoral rules that enhance political accountability play a crucial role in constraining politician's corrupt behavior.
Journal Article