How corruption hits people when they are down

Using Peruvian data, I show that victims of misfortune, particularly crime victims, are much more likely than non-victims to bribe public officials. Misfortune increases victims' demand for public services, raising bribery indirectly, and also increases victims' propensity to bribe certain officials conditional on using them, possibly because victims are desperate, vulnerable, or demanding services particularly prone to corruption. The effect is strongest for bribery of the police, where the increase in bribery comes principally through increased use of the police. For the judiciary the effect is also strong, and for some misfortunes is composed equally of an increase in use and an increase in bribery conditional on use. The expense and disutility of bribing thus compound the misery brought by misfortune.     

Bribery,inefficiency, and bureaucratic delay

We examine bribery in a dynamic setting with a partially honest bureaucracy. The presence of honest officials lowers the bribe that a corrupt official can extract from efficient applicants. Consequently, efficient applicants may face delays in receiving licenses, or may never receive licenses, as inefficient applicants are serviced ahead of them. An increase in the proportion of honest officials, while directly increasing the incidence of socially optimal decisions, can also induce greater inefficiencies (misallocation and delay) from corrupt officials. As a result, social welfare may be non-monotonic in the proportion of honest officials, and small differences in monitoring costs may lead to very different levels of corruption. Competition between officials can hurt efficiency; its desirability depends on the prevalence of applicants' ability to pay bribes.     

Political decentralization and corruption: Evidence from around the world

How does political decentralization affect the frequency and costliness of bribe extraction by corrupt officials? Previous empirical studies, using subjective indexes of perceived corruption and mostly fiscal indicators of decentralization, have suggested conflicting conclusions. In search of more precise findings, we combine and explore two new data sources—an original cross-national data set on particular types of decentralization and the results of a firm level survey conducted in 80 countries about firms' concrete experiences with bribery. In countries with a larger number of government or administrative tiers and (given local revenues) a larger number of local public employees, reported bribery was more frequent. When local—or central—governments received a larger share of GDP in revenue, bribery was less frequent. Overall, the results suggest the danger of uncoordinated rent-seeking as government structures become more complex.     

Love conditionally: The ownership structure and bribery behavior of Chinese firms

This paper studies empirically the determinants of firm bribery activities from the perspective of ownership structure. Using data on Chinese firms obtained from the Enterprise Surveys conducted by the World Bank, we compare the bribery activities of firms with various forms of ownership. We find that compared with private and foreign firms, state‐owned firms in China are not only more likely to receive bribe requests from government officials, but are also more likely to pay bribes. Meanwhile, firms are more likely to bribe if they are extorted, or if they expect to reduce infrastructural obstacles to their business operations. Other factors such as manager experience and external audits also exhibit significant influence upon firms’ bribery decisions.     

Former Communist party membership and bribery in the post-socialist countries

We study the effect of former Communist party membership on paying bribes to public officials and motivations for bribery, 25 years after the fall of communist rule. Data come from a large representative survey, conducted in post-socialist countries in 2015/16. To deal with endogeneity, we instrument party membership with information on whether family members were affected by the Second World War. Instrumental variable results suggest that links to the former Communist party increase the likelihood of paying bribes today; this result applies to the former party members as well as their children and relatives. Among bribe payers, people with the party links are more likely to offer bribes as well as think that bribe payments are expected. Overall, our findings suggest that the proclivity to corruption of the former Communist party members has been transmitted through family and thus sustained over time, contributing to corruption decades after the demise of the Socialist bloc.     

Intermediaries in corruption: an experiment

Anecdotal evidence suggests that intermediaries are ubiquitous in corrupt activities; however, empirical evidence on their role as facilitators of corrupt transactions is scarce. This paper asks whether intermediaries facilitate corruption by reducing the moral or psychological costs of possible bribers and bribees. We designed bribery lab experiment that simulates petty corruption transactions between private citizens and public officials. The experimental data confirm that intermediaries lower the moral costs of citizens and officials and, thus, increase corruption. Our results have implications with respect to possible anti-corruption policies targeting the legitimacy of the use of intermediaries for the provision of government services.     

Decentralized Bribery and Market Participation

I propose a bribery model that examines decentralized bureaucratic decision‐making. There are multiple stable equilibria. High levels of bribery reduce an economy's productivity because corruption suppresses small business, and reduces the total graft, even though the size of an individual bribe might increase. Decentralization prevents movement towards a Pareto‐dominant equilibrium. Anticorruption efforts, even temporary ones, might be useful to improve participation, if they lower the bribe levels demanded and thus encourage small businesses to participate.     

The effects of externalities and framing on bribery in a petty corruption experiment

Using a simple one-shot bribery game simulating petty corruption exchanges, we find evidence of a negative externality effect and a framing effect. When the losses suffered by third parties due to a bribe being offered and accepted are high and the game is presented as a petty corruption scenario instead of in abstract terms bribes are less likely to be offered. Higher negative externalities are also associated with less bribe acceptance. However, framing has no effect on bribe acceptance, indicating that the issue of artificiality may be of particular importance in bribery experiments.     

Economics of public good provision: auditing, outsourcing, and bribery

Abstract .  This study investigates a government's contracting decision to audit or outsource the provision of a public good given a potential hidden bribe and information asymmetries. The key findings are the following. First, the bribe and price of the public good are increasing in the corruptibility of the department. Second, the bribe is decreasing in the firm's bargaining power. Third, a bribery equilibrium exists when the department's corruptibility is sufficiently high given the firm's bargaining power. A bribe involves extortion or a compensatory payment depending on the department's corruptibility. Only a compensatory bribe affects the department's contracting decision.     

Asymmetric Punishment as an Instrument of Corruption Control

The control of bribery is a policy objective in many developing countries. It has been argued that asymmetric punishments could reduce bribery by incentivizing whistle‐blowing. This paper investigates the role played by asymmetric punishment in a setting where bribe size is determined by Nash bargaining, detection is costly, and detection rates are set endogenously. First, if whistle‐blowing is infeasible, the symmetry properties of punishment are irrelevant to bribery deterrence but not to bribe size. Bribery disappears if expected penalties are sufficiently high; otherwise, bribe sizes rise as expected penalties rise. Second, when the bribe‐giver may whistle‐blow, a switch from symmetric to asymmetric punishment eliminates bribery only if whistle‐blowing is cheap and the stakes are low. When bribery persists, multiple bribe sizes could survive in equilibrium. The paper derives parameter values under which each of these outcomes occurs, and discusses implications for welfare and the design of policy.     

Are corruption and taxation really harmful to growth? Firm level evidence

Exploiting a unique data set containing information on the estimated bribe payments of Ugandan firms, we study the relationship between bribery payments, taxes and firm growth. Using industry-location averages to circumvent potential problems of endogeneity and measurement errors, we find that both the rate of taxation and bribery are negatively correlated with firm growth. A one-percentage point increase in the bribery rate is associated with a reduction in firm growth of three percentage points, an effect that is about three times greater than that of taxation. This provides some validation for firm-level theories of corruption which posit that corruption retards the development process to an even greater extent than taxation.     

Group Dynamics of Corruption in Public Organizations

Abstract

When there are two groups of officials in a public organization, we show that depending on the groups’ behavior – collusive or competitive – increasing the level of monitoring and punishment may have different impacts on corruption. If the two groups of public officials had been demonstrating collusive behavior, increased monitoring or punishment reduces both the level of corrupt activities and the corrupt officials’ bribe revenues. However, if the groups had not been colluding, increased monitoring reduces the level of corruption, but increases the corruption revenues collected. Only after reaching the optimum level of monitoring, is this result reversed.     

Corruption governance and its dynamic stability based on a three-party evolutionary game with the government,the public,and public officials

The current state of corruption in China is still worrisome. Corruption among public officials depends not only on their subjective will, but also on the success rate of government investigations and public whistleblowing. Based on the evolutionary game theory, this study constructs an evolutionary game model with the government, the people, and public officials and solves the dynamic model. The authors also provide a numerical simulation of the proposed model to confirm theoretical predictions. The results reveal that when the government’s success rate reaches a certain threshold, public officials will trend to a strategy of no bribery, and at this threshold, raising the cost of bribing public officials can quickly prevent them from corruption. At the equilibrium, the public will trend toward a strategy of no whistleblowing. The findings of this study are of great significance to the current anti-corruption debate in China.     

Can bribery buy health? Evidence from post-communist countries

Corruption is pervasive, but we know little about its effects on individual lives. Using individual-level data from 28 post-communist countries, we demonstrate that bribing for public services worsens self-assessed health. We account for endogeneity of bribery and show that bribing for any type of public service, not just for health services, has an adverse impact. We also find that bribery lowers the quality of services received. Moreover, there are potentially high indirect costs of bribery since, as we show, it comes at the expense of cutting food consumption. These findings suggest that corruption is a potentially important source behind the poor health outcomes in many developing countries.     

Procurement auctions with ex-ante endogenous bribery

Corruption is a prevalent phenomenon in various procurement auctions. This paper explores a pattern of bribery between an auctioneer and a favored bidder, and also investigates the regulation scheme of buyer. In the model, the favored bidder is allowed to submit two bids simultaneously with the advantageous one to be announced; auctioneer decides the share of the difference between two bids which is the bribe transfer. The analysis shows that, the favored bidder does not participate in the corruption if his cost exceeds a threshold; otherwise he submits two bids whose difference is decreasing in the share. The corruption benefits both the auctioneer and the favored bidder but harms other bidders. The bribery endogenously leads to allocation inefficiency with a probability decreasing in the bribe share. Specifically, with two uniformly distributed bidders, we examine how the auctioneer optimizes the bribe share and how the buyer regulates the corruption. We find that, by driving the auctioneer to charge a higher bribe share that is less attractive for the favored bidder, severer regulation tends to reduce the probability of corruption. A buyer who adopts extremely severe regulation can exclude the corruption and achieve maximum social welfare, while a buyer who aims to maximize his own profit should tolerate some degree of the corruption.     

EVALUATING GAINS FROM MERGERS IN A NON-PARAMETRIC PUBLIC GOOD MODEL OF POLICE SERVICES

ABSTRACT ** :  The merger of police services in the UK has been suggested on the grounds that efficiency improvements will be possible. This paper applies a public good model of the police service to evaluate the potential efficiency gains from mergers of police services in England and Wales. It uses a non-parametric method suggested by Bogetoft and Wang (2005) . We construct a dataset that reflects the public good nature of police service and allows for the exogenous imposition by government on the level of police service budgets. Our main finding is that English and Welsh police service mergers could lead to increases in police staff resource efficiencies between 10 per cent and 70 per cent. Hence, we confirm the government's decision to merge English and Welsh police services.     

商业贿赂成因与治理的经济学分析

垄断为商业贿赂的产生和蔓延创造了条件,特别是供求失衡和信息不对称的存在为经营者进行商业贿赂带来了动力。虽然我国近年来更加重视和加强了对商业贿赂的治理,但在成本约束和信息不对称的作用下,单纯依靠政府的监管来治理商业贿赂成本高昂且效果有限。所以要想有效治理商业贿赂,我们就要从商业贿赂的成因出发,瓦解其滋生的环境,在加强政府监管的同时进一步完善法律规制,并借助全社会力量构筑全方位的商业贿赂治理体系。     

The nexus between public sector corruption and private sector efficiency: Evidence from worldwide firm-level data

Anti-corruption is highlighted as one of the key institutional principles by the United Nations, as corruption hinders the progress in achieving sustainable development goals. However, the extant literature on how private firms' efficiency is influenced by corruption prevailing in regulatory agencies across economies has been inconclusive. Analyzing the World Bank Enterprise Survey data across 45,121 firms from 80 countries, this study finds that bribe payments to corrupt public officials by firms causes bureaucratic delays. Employing an instrumental variable Tobit framework to address the issue of endogeneity inherited with observational data, this study demonstrates that an increase in the magnitude of bribes and depth of corruption by one percentage point separately expands the firm managers' time being spent on regulatory requirements by 2.78 percentage points and 2.47 percentage points, respectively. The findings are robust to different specifications. The results imply the importance of promoting anti-corruption measures across countries to create a conducive environment for firms to enhance efficiency, and thereby to achieve sustainable development goals successfully.     

Staff rotation as an anti-corruption policy: an experimental study

Within the German federal government regular staff rotation is a precautionary measure against corruption in public administration. To study the effect of this policy, an experiment was conducted where pairs of potential bribers and public officials were randomly re-matched in every round. The outcome is compared to the case where the identity of the pairs interacting remained fixed. The conclusion is that rotation of interacting pairs significantly reduces the levels of bribes as well as the frequency of inefficient decisions due to bribery.     

Guns and crime revisited

I focus on the effect of changes in public security (policing) on private security measures that potential victims can take. In particular, I look at the tradeoff between different types of private security measures – such as using or carrying guns, carrying less cash or keeping less valuables at home, and using burglar alarms or Lojack – and study how this tradeoff is affected by changes in public security. If private householders’ direct security expenses are strongly substitutable with public policing (e.g., for guns which may be more useful in badly policed areas), an increase in policing results in a drop in these expenses; it also results in carrying or keeping less cash (an indirect security measure which reduces the prize a criminal can seize). If, however, householders’ direct security expenses are “complementary” to policing in the sense that they are more effective when police response is rapid (e.g., for burglar alarms), more policing increases these expenses unless the efficacy of joint (public and private) security expenses on combating crime encounters very sharply diminishing returns; moreover, a rise in policing also induces carrying or keeping more cash. An increase in penalties increases the tendency to keep cash on hand, and also reduces crime, provided that as private precautions increase, with policing constant, it takes a larger increment in security spending to compensate for a specific drop in penalties. The results are consistent with some empirical trends in crime rates, policing, penalties and private precautions.