We argue that the decision to bribe bureaucrats depends on the frequency of corruption within a society. We provide a behavioral model to explain this conduct: engaging in corruption results in a disutility of guilt. This implies that people observe a lower probability to be involved in corruption if on average the guilt level of others within a country is higher. We also explore whether and to...

March 2, 2006 Abstract: Indonesia has a tradition of corruption among local officials who harass and collect bribes from firms. Corruption flourished in the Suharto, pre-democracy era. This paper asks whether local democratization that occurred after Suharto reduced corruption and whether specific local politics, over and above the effects of local culture, affect corruption. We have a firm lev...

Both corruption and subjective well-being (SWB) are of concern to academics, governments, and policy makers. Although intuition suggests that corruption deteriorates SWB, some evidence suggests that corruption can enhance the economy, which may in turn improve SWB. We seek to explore whether, how, and when corruption is related to SWB using representative data from 150 nations. Surprisingly, we...

Parameter clustering is a robust estimation technique based on location statistics in a parameter space where parameter samples are computed from data samples. This article investigates parameter clustering as a global estimator of object pose or rigid motion from dense range data without knowing correspondences between data points. Four variants of the algorithm are quantitatively compared reg...

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...

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...

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...

This paper used data from firms operating in twenty Latin American countries to evaluate whether firms’ perceptions about the nature and predictability of governments’ regulatory policies, the prevalence of intervention in the domestic economy, and the degree to which corruption served as an obstacle to business activity influenced firms’ growth. The paper also tested whether firms’ size or mul...