Over the past few years, many studies have looked the macroeconomic, cultural and institutional determinants of corruption. This study complements these existing cross-country studies by focusing on microeconomic factors that affect bribes paid in a single sector of the economy. Using enterpriselevel data on bribes paid to utilities in 21 transition economies in Eastern Europe and Central Asia,...

Past economic reform of the state sector in China consisted mainly of privatization, of agriculture and of small and medium-size state enterprises, leaving large state enterprises in the control of the state. Current reform consists of making state-owned enterprises and banks more efficient and functioning like private enterprises, and gradual privatization of some large state enterprises. Bure...

Institutional corruption in the health care sector has gained considerable attention during recent years, as it acknowledges the fact that service providers who are acting in accordance with the institutional and environmental settings can nevertheless undermine a health care system's purposes as a result of the (financial) conflicts of interest to which the service providers are exposed. The p...

While various forms of corruption are common in many health systems around the world, defining wrongdoing in terms of legality and the use of public office for private gain obstructs our understanding of its nature and intractability. To address this, I suggest, we must not only break the silence about the extent of wrongdoing in the health sector, but also talk differe...

This paper develops a principal-agent model to explore the interaction of corruption, bribery, and political oversight of production. Under full information, an honest politician achieves the first best while a dishonest politician creates shortages and bribes. Under asymmetric information, an honest politician may create more shortages relative to a dishonest one, but the latter creates more b...

Many recent studies have looked at the macroeconomic, cultural and institutional determinants of corruption at the cross-national level. Using enterprise-level data on bribes paid to utilities in 21 transition economies in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, we examine how characteristics of the utilities taking bribes and the firms paying bribes affect the equilibrium level of corruption in the s...

Strengthening good governance and preventing corruption in health care are universal challenges. The Karnataka Lokayukta (KLA), a public complaints agency in Karnataka state (India), was created in 1986 but played a prominent role controlling systemic corruption only after a change of leadership in 2001 with a new Lokayukta (ombudsman) and Vigilance Director for Health (VDH). This case study of...

This paper develops a simple framework to analyze the links between corruption and the unofficial economy and their implications for the official economy. In a model of self-selection with heterogeneous entrepreneurs, we show that the entrepreneurs’ option to flee to the underground economy constrains a corrupt official’s ability to introduce distortions to the economy for private gains. The un...

This paper exploits public announcements of corruption allegations amongst Nigerian political figures to estimate the impact of political connections on firm value. Specifically, I draw results from market reactions to 27 events to determine whether politically connected firms suffer more from financial malpractice amongst government officials. This paper finds heterogeneous impacts of corrupti...

systematic and widespread corruption; a problem in russia’s transition period russia is among those countries that are grappled with widespread and systematic corruption in state organizations. meanwhile, different russian governments have failed to reduce the scope of corruption. this article studies nature, roots and repercussions of corruption and analyzes approaches to combat it in russia. ...