Citizen Demand for Corruption: Evidence from Roadway Tolls in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

This paper explores citizen demand for corruption in the context of a randomized controlled trial at roadway tolls in Kananga, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Motorcycle taxi drivers were offered financial and social incentives to bring receipts proving that they paid the legal toll. We find that financial incentives cause a 7 to 10 percentage increase in the probability that drivers get receipts. IV estimates are considerably larger. The implied elasticity of citizen demand for bribes with respect to the effective price of the toll ranges from -0.45 and -0.95, depending on assumptions about drivers’ rates of discounting. This result is consistent with a collusive, Nash-bargaining arrangement between drivers and agents, where financial incentives reduce corruption and affect the intensive margin of bribe paid. Our results on equilibrium bribes are more mixed, though a Tobit specification recovers the model’s main predictions. We present additional results exploiting variation in driver cost-of-time that suggest agents have partial coercive power, which may put an upper bound on the effectiveness of citizen-side anti-corruption initiatives.