Corruption is costly for developing nations’ economies, but scholars and policy makers do not fully understand who bears the cost of corruption. We conduct a field experiment in Malawi to determine the impacts of political connections, socioeconomic status, and shared ethnicity on the degree of corruption a citizen encounters across two contexts – police roadblocks and electricity service offic...

This paper investigates the design of optimal procurement mechanisms in the presence of corruption. After the sponsor and the contractor sign the contract, the latter may bribe the inspector to misrepresent quality. Thus, the mechanism affects whether bribery occurs. I show how to include bribery as an additional constraint in the optimal-control problem that the sponsor solves, and characteriz...

In this paper, we study the impact of corruption in context a game involving manager and controller. We propose model where controller initiates bribe demand from manager. identify structure three potential subgame perfect Nash equilibria, show their uniqueness. Next, analyze influence parameters (bribery amount, reciprocity bonus reputation gain) manager's controller's bonuses / penalties on e...

Many Bolivians engage in corruption through intermediaries, like civil society representatives and lawyers, instead of paying officials directly. People vocally resent that intermediaries add an extra layer costs opaqueness to but still choose pay bribes knowingly take advantage them. Why do facilitate corruption? While other studies on corrupt find they reduce uncertainty transaction costs, th...