In an editorial titled “We Need to Talk About Corruption in Health Systems” the authors Hutchinson, Balabanova, and McKee hope to encourage a wider conversation about corruption in the health sector. Such conversations are difficult to hold for at least five reasons; it is hard to define corruption; corruption may allow some fragile health systems to subsist, shifting blame – are those involved...

Using count data on Indian joint ventures (JVs) and wholly owned subsidiaries (WOS), we present an empirical analysis of FDI-related ownership choices and their relation with host country characteristics and indicators of transaction costs. Our Negative Binomial regression models offer only weak support for the bargaining perspective, according to which JVs should be more likely if the host cou...

In many countries with weak political institutions, new ventures face challenges such as political risks, corruption, and civil conflict, which can severely hinder their ability to survive and grow. We explore how establishing affiliations at founding with coercive institutional actors can help new ventures overcome challenges characteristic of weak and volatile political environments. Our find...

Building on an institutionalist framework of the various organizational field-level pressures on firms to engage with the challenge of corruption, we analyse anti-corruption disclosures across a sample of 933 sustainability reports. Such reporting complements anti-corruption initiatives, as it allows the company to demonstrate its commitment. Our results show clear countryand sector-level diffe...

Many regard corruption to be detrimental to international trade. Some, however, think that corruption greases commerce in case of low-quality institutions. Others argue that arbitrary corruption is more damaging to trade than predictable corruption. This is the first paper to test these hypotheses empirically with trade-related measures of corruption. It finds that in general, corruption is det...

Recent scholarly attention has focused on weak governance and the negative effects of corruption on the provision of health services. Employing agency theory, this article discusses corruption in the South African health sector. We used a combination of research methods and triangulated data from three sources: Auditor-General of South Africa reports for each province covering a 9-year period; ...

Corruption, Networking and Foreign Ownership: Recent Evidence from CEE Countries The present paper argues that the effect of corruption on foreign ownership is not necessarily linear and depends on the level of host corruption. So long as the expected returns from foreign investments exceed its expected costs, higher host corruption will be associated with higher foreign ownership. However, cos...

This essay explores the nature, causes, and consequences of corruption as it pertains to entire regimes. Grand corruption is modeled as a type of unproductive rent-seeking at the highest levels of government. The economic costs of corruption are assumed to increase in the decentralization (and relaxation) of its governance, increase convexly in the percentage extracted, and decreasing in the op...

The topic of corruption has recently attracted a great deal of attention, yet there is still a lack of micro level empirical evidence regarding the determinants of corruption. Furthermore, the present literature has not investigated the effects of political interest on corruption despite the interesting potential of this link. We address these deficiencies by analyzing a cross-section of indivi...

Corruption is defined in an occupational choice model as extra fees that must be paid by some entrepreneurs. Higher corruption leads to lower wages and total output. Income inequality follows a Kuznets relationship with both corruption and income. Two types of decentralization of the bribe-setters are distinguished, regional and bureaucratic. When mobility is imperfect, bureaucratic decentraliz...