We report quantitative relations between corruption level and economic factors, such as country wealth and foreign investment per capita, which are characterized by a power law spanning multiple scales of wealth and investment per capita. These relations hold for diverse countries, and also remain stable over different time periods. We also observe a negative correlation between level of corrup...

This paper discusses the issue of perceptions and their influence on economic processes focusing on corruption perception. The higher the perceived corruption in an organization is, the more probable it is that a person dealing with that organization would offer a bribe, thus supporting corruption. Since corruption perceptions are rarely based on actual experience, they might describe reality i...

Previous research stresses that system justifying belief can weaken corruption perception, by this possibly fostering unjust behaviors. However, general results of the effect of general system justification on corruption are ambiguous, indicating also a lessening impact. We conducted a line of studies trying to elucidate these circumstances by testing the effect of general system justification ...

Numerous investigations demonstrate that the problem of corruption in the health sector is enormous and has grave negative consequences for patients. Nevertheless, the problem of corruption in health systems is far from eminent in the international health policy debate. Hutchinson, Balabanova, and McKee have identifed in their Editorial five reasons why the health policy community has been relu...

Corruption poses one of the major societal challenges of our time. Considerable advances have been made in understanding corruption on a macro level, yet the psychological antecedents of corrupt behavior remain largely unknown. In order to explain why some people engage in corruption while others do not, we explored the impact of descriptive social norms on corrupt behavior by using a novel beh...

We explore theoretically and empirically whether social interaction, including local and global interaction, influences the incidence of corruption. We first present an interaction-based model on corruption that predicts that the level of corruption is positively associated with social interaction. Then we empirically verify the theoretical prediction using within-country evidence at the provin...

In just a few months in early 1997, Mexico fired its top drug-enforcement official for accepting bribes and ultimately closed the agency because it was so ridden with corruption; Ukraine’s president once again declared war on corruption; Chinese Prime Minister Li Peng lamented that his country was losing ground in its war on corruption; President Kim Young Sam deplored endemic corruption in Sou...