Corruption is now a popular topic in the social sciences. This expansion of interest is evident in economics and elsewhere, where a large number of articles on this theme have been published in leading journals. Some organizations publish indicative data on corruption. For example, Transparency International publishes a widely cited ―Corruption Perceptions Index‖ for most countries, and these d...

Corruption often creates a “briber’s dilemma”: each of the “clients” competing for a rent allocated by a government official has an incentive to pay bribes to try to obtain preferential treatment, but they would all be better off if they could mutually commit not to pay bribes. This paper uses a model of linked games to show how informal relationships among the clients may enable them to enforc...

Using individual-level data for 35 countries, we investigate the microeconomic determinants of attitudes towards corruption. We consistently find women, employed, less wealthy, and older individuals to be more averse to corruption. We also provide evidence that social effects play an important role in determining individual attitudes towards corruption, as these are robustly and significantly a...

We present an in…nite-horizon planner-doer model of moral standards, where individuals receive random temptations (such as bribe o¤ers) and must decide which to resist. Individual actions depend both on conscious deliberation and on a type re‡ecting unconscious drives. Temptations yield consumption value, but con…dence in being the type of person who resists temptations yields self-esteem. We i...

This thesis compares media portrayals of political corruption in the United States of America versus the People’s Republic of China. Political corruption is considerably understudied and poses a serious threat to the social, political, and economic wellbeing of all nations. By studying each country’s corresponding media portrayals, this thesis was able to identify how seemingly opposing styles ...

We study non-collusive corruption in the education sector. For this purpose, we construct a simple theoretical model that captures non-collusive corruption between service providers (teachers) and service demanders (students). The model shows that the bribe paid by the service demander increases with the level of red tape and her income level, but it decrease with the improvement of the individ...

Morally motivated individuals behave more cooperatively than predicted by standard theory. Hence, if a firm can attract workers who are strongly motivated by ethical concerns, moral hazard problems like shirking can be reduced. We show that employers may be able to use the firm’s corporate social responsibility profile as a screening device to attract more productive workers. Both pooling and s...

In this study we explore in detail the causes of corruption in China using two different sets of data at the regional level (provinces and cities). We observe that regions with more anti-corruption efforts, histories of British rule, higher openness, more access to media and relatively higher wages of government employees are markedly less corrupt; while social heterogeneity, regulation, abunda...