— Does democracy suffer when corruption is high? Unfortunately, most studies of corruption have been descriptive, making it difficult to develop a well-supported answer to this question. There are, of course, quantitative corruption measures, but the most popularly used of them are measures of corruption perception aggregated at the national level, rather than corruption experience at the indiv...

The topic of corruption has recently attracted a great deal of attention, yet there is still a lack of micro level empirical evidence regarding the determinants of corruption. Furthermore, the present literature has not investigated the effects of political interest on corruption despite the interesting potential of this link. We address these deficiencies by analyzing a cross-section of indivi...

Corruption in public administration is a cause for continuing concern, particularly in the developing world. Although optimism regarding the ability of e-government to reduce or eliminate corruption is widespread, neutral impact assessment reports however continue to expose cases where corruption persists even after the introduction of e-government. Clearly, there is a need for strengthening re...

Building on an institutionalist framework of the various organizational field-level pressures on firms to engage with the challenge of corruption, we analyse anti-corruption disclosures across a sample of 933 sustainability reports. Such reporting complements anti-corruption initiatives, as it allows the company to demonstrate its commitment. Our results show clear countryand sector-level diffe...

Many regard corruption to be detrimental to international trade. Some, however, think that corruption greases commerce in case of low-quality institutions. Others argue that arbitrary corruption is more damaging to trade than predictable corruption. This is the first paper to test these hypotheses empirically with trade-related measures of corruption. It finds that in general, corruption is det...

We study bureaucratic corruption in a model in which a constituency sets required levels for a given set of activities. Each activity is carried out by an external provider, and its realization is supervised by a bureaucrat. While bureaucrats are supposed to act on behalf of the constituency, they can decide to be corrupt and allow providers to deliver lower activity levels than contracted in e...

Corruption is a worldwide phenomenon, particularly in many developing countries, which contain a large proportion of global biodiversity. Most alarming, from a biodiversity-conservation perspective, is the frequent corruption of government officials who manage valuable natural resources, such as timber, oil and precious minerals. A recent study by Joyotee Smith and colleagues describes rampant ...

The call of the editorial of the International Journal of Health Policy and Management regarding the “Need to talk about corruption in health systems” is spot on. However, the perceived difficulties of why this is so should be explored from an actor’s perspective, as they differ for government actors, donors and the research community. In particular, false dilemmas around definition pr...