This paper discusses the issue of perceptions and their influence on economic processes focusing on corruption perception. The higher the perceived corruption in an organization is, the more probable it is that a person dealing with that organization would offer a bribe, thus supporting corruption. Since corruption perceptions are rarely based on actual experience, they might describe reality i...

Educational corruption is a relatively new area of study in economics due mainly to the lack of available data. This paper utilizes a unique data set to examine educational corruption of various types including bribing on exams and term papers as well as bribing to obtain credits and bribing to enter educational institutions. The data was gathered from 1588 students attending educational instit...

We develop a con‡ict model linking dissipation to the distribution of the population over an arbitrary number of groups. We extend the pure contest version of the model by Esteban and Ray (1999) to include a mixed public-private good. We analyze how the level of dissipation changes as the population distribution and the share of publicness of the prize change. First, we …nd that, in case of pur...

This Working Paper should not be reported as representing the views of the IMF. The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate. A well-functioning public expenditure management (PEM) system...

We experimentally investigate the extent to which social observability of one’s actions and the possibility of social non-monetary judgment affect the decision to engage in rule breaking behavior. We consider three rule breaking scenarios — theft, bribery and embezzlement — in the absence of any formal enforcement mechanism. By involving a student sample characterized by cultural heterogeneity ...

I combine newly digitized personnel and public finance data from the British colonial administration 1854-1966 to study how patronage affects the promotion and performance of governors. Governors are more likely to be promoted to higher salaried colonies when connected to their superior during the period of patronage. Once allocated, they provide more tax exemptions, raise less revenue, and inv...