the role of wages and auditing during a crackdown on corruption in the city of buenos aires abstract we study the prices paid for basic inputs during a crackdown on corruption in the public hospitals of the city of buenos aires argentina during 1996 97 we find a well defined negative effect on the measures used to capture corruption prices paid by hospitals for basic homogeneous inputs decrease by 15 percent during the first 9 months of the crackdown after this period prices increase but they are still 10 percent lower than those prevailing before the crackdown relative to the precrackdown period higher wages play no role in inducing lower input prices when audit intensity can be expected to be maximal during the first phase of the crackdown but have a negative and well defined effect when audit intensity takes intermediate levels the last phase of the crackdown controlling for fixed effects we find that the wage elasticity of input prices exceeds 20 these results are consistent with the standard model of bribes of gary becker and george stigler

corruption in america abstract we use a data set of federal corruption convictions in the u s to investigate the causes and consequences of corruption more educated states and to a smaller degree richer states have less corruption this relationship holds even when we use historical factors like congregationalism in 1890 as an instrument for the level of schooling today the level of corruption is also correlated with the level of income inequality and racial fractionalization and uncorrelated with the size of government there is a weak negative relationship between corruption and economic development in a state these results echo the cross country findings and support the view that the correlation between development and good political outcomes occurs because education improves political institutions

management of bureaucrats and public service delivery evidence from the nigerian civil service we study how the management practices bureaucrats operate under relate to the quantity and quality of public services delivered we do so exploiting data from the nigerian civil service for 4700 public sector projects we have hand coded independent engineering assessments of project completion rates and delivered quality we supplement this with a survey eliciting management practices for bureaucrats in the 63 civil service organizations responsible for these projects building on bloom and van reenen 2007 management practices matter a one standard deviation increase in bureaucrat s autonomy signi cantly increases project completion rates by 18 a one standard deviation increase in practices related to incentives monitoring of bureaucrats signi cantly lowers project completion rates by 14 we show the negative impacts of incentive provision monitoring arise because bureaucrats multi task and incentives are poorly targeted and because these management practices capture elements of subjective performance evaluation that leave scope for dysfunctional responses from bureaucrats to support a causal interpretation of our ndings we document the determinants of management practices and examine channels through which organizations might endogenously adjust management practices our results provide novel insights into how changes in how bureaucrats are managed can have potentially large impacts on public service delivery in a developing country context jel classi cation j33 j38 o20

keeping the public purse an experiment in windfalls taxes and the incentives to restrain government it is widely believed that natural resource wealth foreign aid and other types of windfall revenue increase corruption and undermine accountability a predominant claim in political science is that windfalls free politicians from the need to tax resulting in a more politically quiescent population yet there is surprisingly little evidence to substantiate not only whether taxation has this eect but also why i use novel experiments to provide the rst micro level causal test of claims that 1 taxes motivate citizens more than windfalls to hold politicians accountable and 2 citizens care more about wasted revenue when they pay taxes the experiments were embedded in a public awareness campaign conducted with 1 863 citizens in a resource rich district in indonesia the results measured through a survey and a postcard campaign show that taxes made participants more willing to monitor government and hold politicians accountable than windfalls primarily because of a stronger sense of ownership over public funds yet when better information on government spending is made available the windfall group proved just as intolerant of misspent revenue these ndings have important implications for understanding not only how taxation motivates political action but also how revenue shapes the ways in which citizens acquire and process information on government spending

separation of powers and political accountability political constitutions are incomplete contracts and therefore leave room for abuse of power in democracies elections are the primary mechanism for disciplining public officials but they are not sufficient separation of powers between executive and legislative bodies also helps to prevent the abuse of power but only with appropriate checks and balances checks and balances work by creating a conflict of interest between the executive and the legislature yet requiring both bodies to agree on public policy in this way the two bodies discipline each other to the voters advantage under appropriate checks and balances separation of powers also helps the voters elicit information

choosing to target what types of countries get different types of world bank projects well governed countries are more likely to make use of foreign aid for the purposes of economic development and poverty alleviation therefore if aid agencies are providing funds for the sake of development these countries should receive more aid and categorically different types of aid as compared with poorly governed countries in poorly governed countries aid should be given in forms that allow for less discretion using an original data set of all world bank projects from 1996 to 2002 the author distinguishes programmatic projects from investment projects and national from subnational investment projects if the world bank allows more discretion in well governed countries then it will choose to provide programmatic and national aid for these recipients the author presents evidence that the world bank provides a larger proportion of national investment lending in better governed countries with regard to programmatic lending he finds mixed evidence among counties eligible for international development association ida aid good governance surprisingly is associated with a lower proportion of programmatic aid whereas for international bank for reconstruction and development ibrd borrowers good governance is associated with a higher proportion the author subjects these results to a number of robustness checks although he confirms the existing result in the literature that the world bank provides larger overall amounts of aid to better governed countries his examination of the disaggregated data leads to questioning whether both lending wings of the world bank are designing aid programs in the most prodevelopment way possible

institution building with limited resources establishing a supreme audit institution in rwanda summary this study examines the tensions between best practice institutional benchmarks and local operational constraints in a developing country institution building process drawing on data from document studies and key informant interviews we investigate if and how staff capacity constraints affect the achievement of the programmatic ideal of supreme audit institution sai independence and what tradeoffs this gives rise to in the development of a sai oversight function in rwanda the empirical results suggest that capacity constraints negatively affect important aspects of sai independence and point to the need for contextual institutional solutions to safeguard independence as well as to tackle capacity constraints

strategic public policy around population thresholds abstract political economists have long maintained that politicians respond to both re election and financial incentives this article contributes to the latter literature by analysing whether when and how local office holders respond to the economic incentives embedded in exogenously imposed population thresholds leading to an increased number and remuneration of local politicians building on insights from the urban economics and public finance literatures we argue that local politicians may strategically adjust fiscal and housing policies to stimulate in migration when approaching a population threshold where their remuneration increases using data from all 589 belgian municipalities over the period 1977 2016 our results confirm that approaching important population thresholds causes lower local tax rates and the granting of additional building permits particularly for apartments these policy changes occur early in the election cycle and at least for housing policy are restricted to incumbent mayors themselves expecting to benefit from crossing the population threshold

presidential coattails versus the median voter senator selection in us elections abstract we show that senators elected in presidential elections are more ideologically extreme than senators elected in midterm elections this finding is in contrast to the literature suggesting that voters in presidential elections are more ideologically moderate than voters in midterm elections to explain this incongruence we propose a theory of spillover effects in which party labels enable voters to update their beliefs about candidates across contemporaneous races for office unexpected support for a candidate in one race carries marginal candidates from the same party in other races our theory implies that presidential coattails may skew representative government away from the median voter ideal

the political economy of stabilization commitment capacity and public response abstract political pressures are generally recognized as important in determining success or failure of economic stabilization and adjustment programs but there has been little comparative analysis of the politics of stabilization this study examines the factors affecting i political leaders commitment to stabilization measures often called political will ii governmental ability to implement stabilization measures and iii the responses of key interest groups and the public at large to those measures the study also discusses political implications of the design of programs and the attempted speed of stabilization and sketches the tactics available to governments to manage political risk including partial compensation persuasion diversion or obfuscation and containment of protest the discussion is based on case studies of stabilization efforts in five fairly poor small highly trade dependent countries ghana in the late 1960s and early 1970s and zambia kenya sri lanka and jamaica in the late 1970s and early 1980s a subsidiary theme within the broader discussion is the ways in which the political economy of stabilization may differ in such countries as compared to larger semi industrialized economies

has democratization reduced infant mortality in sub saharan africa evidence from micro data does democracy help babies survive in sub saharan africa by using retrospective fertility surveys conducted in 28 african countries i compare the survival of infants born to the same mother before and after democratization to disentangle the effect of democracy from that of changes in population characteristics which is infeasible with country level statistics on infant mortality i find that infant mortality falls by 1 2 percentage points 12 of the sample mean after democratization in the post cold war period relevant aspects of democracy appear to be the combination of multiparty elections and leadership change

electoral rules political competition and fiscal expenditures regression discontinuity evidence from brazilian municipalities we exploit a discontinuity in the rules of brazilian mayoral elections to investigate whether political competition has a causal impact on fiscal policy choices in municipalities with fewer than 2

active and passive waste in government spending evidence from a policy experiment we propose a distinction between active and passive waste as determinants of the cost of public services active waste entails utility for the public decision maker whereas passive waste does not we analyze purchases of standardized goods by italian public bodies and exploit a policy experiment associated with a national procurement agency we find that i some public bodies pay systematically more than others for equivalent goods ii differences are correlated with governance structure iii the variation in prices is principally due to variation in passive rather than active waste and iv passive waste accounts for 83 percent of total estimated waste

isolated capital cities accountability and corruption evidence from us states we show that isolated capital cities are robustly associated with greater levels of corruption across us states in line with the view that this isolation reduces accountability we then provide direct evidence that the spatial distribution of population relative to the capital affects different accountability mechanisms newspapers cover state politics more when readers are closer to the capital voters who live far from the capital are less knowledgeable and interested in state politics and they turn out less in state elections we also find that isolated capitals are associated with more money in state level campaigns and worse public good provision jel d72 d73 h41 h83 k42 r23

electoral competition with informed and uninformed voters i present a model of electoral competition in which candidates raise campaign contributions by choosing policies that benefit interest groups and then expend those contributions to influence voters who are uninformed about the policies informed voters however vote based on those policies so candidates face a trade off between choosing a policy to generate funds to attract the uninformed vote and choosing a policy to attract the informed vote electoral equilibria are characterized for two categories of policies particularistic and collective in the case of particularistic policies the equilibrium policies of the candidates are separated if the proportion of uninformed voters is sufficiently high and the degree of separation is an increasing function of that proportion the model is extended to include the public financing of elections and incumbency advantages for the case of collective policies the candidates locate at the median of the ideal points of the informed voters and contributions are zero

political connections and land related investment in rural vietnam abstract this paper uses household panel data from rural vietnam to explore the effects of having a relative in a position of political or bureaucratic power our results suggest that households increase their investment in land improvements due to such ties likely explanations are that connections to office holders strengthen de facto land property rights and access to both credit and transfers results also indicate that officials prefer to use informal rather than formal channels of redistribution to relatives

the simple economics of extortion evidence from trucking in aceh this paper tests whether the behavior of corrupt officials is consistent with standard industrial organization theory we designed a study in which surveyors accompanied indonesian truck drivers on 304 trips during which they observed over 6 000 illegal payments to police soldiers and weigh station attendants using plausibly exogenous changes in the number of checkpoints we show that market structure affects the level of illegal payments we further show that corrupt officials use complex pricing schemes including third degree price discrimination and a menu of two part tariffs our findings illustrate the importance of considering the market structure for bribes when designing anticorruption policy

optimal control of pollution accumulation with long run average welfare this paper considers the problem of pollution accumulation in order to maximize the long run average welfare functional in environmental economics we approach the problem by solving the associated hamilton jacobi bellman equation in the classical sense via the viscosity solution method the optimal policy is shown to exist in a feedback from and the maximum value is also obtained independently of the initial level of pollution an equilibrium of the optimal stock of pollution is discussed

local governance and the quality of local infrastructure evidence from village road projects in rural china abstract research has shown that allowing local communities to elect their own leaders increases local infrastructure investment however much less is known about the effects of local governance reform on the quality of local infrastructure this paper examines the effects of governance reform implemented in rural chinese villages on the quality of village road projects we conduct surveys in 101 rural villages and collect data related to the implementation of the reform over the last two decades we also measure the quality of over 550 village road projects completed in these villages using fixed effects and instrumental variable estimation methods we find that the implementation of village governance reform increases the quality of village road projects we also find evidence supporting the following effect mechanisms 1 village leaders become younger and more educated 2 high quality road projects increase incumbent leaders re election chances and 3 village residents participate more actively in the management and monitoring of village road projects

institutional corruption and election fraud evidence from a field experiment in afghanistan w e investigate the relationship between political networks weak institutions and election fraud during the 2010 parliamentary election in afghanistan combining i data on political connections between candidates and election officials ii a nationwide controlled evaluation of a novel monitoring technology and iii direct measurements of aggregation fraud we find considerable evidence of aggregation fraud in favor of connected candidates and that the announcement of a new monitoring technology reduced theft of election materials by about 60 percent and vote counts for connected candidates by about 25 percent the results have implications for electoral competition and are potentially actionable for policymakers jel c93 d02 d72 k42 o17

corruption as a self fulfilling prophecy evidence from a survey experiment in costa rica an influential body of scholarship argues that corruption behaves as a selffulfilling prophecy the idea of this work is that levels of corruption emerge endogenously as a result of a society wide coordination game in which ther individual returns to corrupt behavior are a function of how disposed towards corruption the other members of society are perceived as being an empirical implication of this logic is that if one were to exogenously perturb beliefs about societal levels of corruption upward willingness to engage in corruption should increase as a consequence the current paper evaluates this claim by utilizing an information experiment embedded in a large scale household survey conducted in the gran area metropolitana gam of costa rica from october 2013 to april 2014 n 4200 changes in beliefs about corruption were induced via the random assignment of an informational display depicting the increasing percentage of costa ricans who have experienced or directly observed an act of corruption from 2006 to 2011 the paper finds that on average assignment to this display relative to the control condition increased the probability that a respondent would be willing to pay a bribe to a police officer by approximately 0 04 to 0 08 thereby providing supporting evidence for the self fulfilling prophecy hypothesis

radio s impact on public spending if informed voters receive favorable policies then the invention of a new mass medium may affect government policies since it affects who is informed and who is not these ideas are developed in a voting model the model forms the basis for an empirical investigation of a major new deal relief program implemented in the middle of the expansion period of radio the main empirical finding is that u s counties with many radio listeners received more relief funds more funds were allocated to poor counties with high unemployment but controlling for these and other variables the effects of radio are large and highly significant

exposing corrupt politicians the effects of brazil s publicly released audits on electoral outcomes author s finan frederico ferraz claudio abstract this paper examines the extent to which access to information enhances political accountability based upon the results of brazil s recent anti corruption program that randomly audits municipal expenditures of federally transferred funds it estimates the effect of the disclosure of local government corruption practices upon the re election success of incumbent mayors in municipal elections comparing municipalities which were randomly audited before the elections with those audited after the analysis shows that the disclosure of audit results had a significant impact on the re election rates of mayors found to be corrupt for a one standard deviation increase in reported corruption the audit policy reduced the incumbent s likelihood of re election by 25 percent this effect is more pronounced in municipalities where radio stations are present and higher levels of corruption are identified these findings highlight the value of information and the role of the media in reducing informational asymmetries in the political process thus enabling voters to not only hold corrupt politicians accountable but also to reward non corrupt politicians

who lobbies whom special interest politics under alternative electoral systems why do some interest groups lobby politicians and others lobby bureaucrats we theorize lobbying venue choices and intensityasafunctionofcontractenforceabilitywithpolicymakers politicians orbureaucrats wearguethatorganizational structures of interest groups in particular whether they are centralized or decentralized substantially affect their lobbying strategies because they are associated with different ability to monitor and enforce contracts with policy makers and punish them when they fail we further demonstrate that the effect of centralized versus decentralized structure on venue choices is conditional on the types of electoral system majoritarian semiproportional single nontransferable vote sntv or proportional representation systems we test this argument using longitudinal survey data on lobbying which span two decades and cover around 250 interest groups in various sectors and issue areas in japan the results lend strong support to our argument about contract enforceability under alternative electoral systems

redistributive public employment abstract politicians may use disguised redistributive policies in order to circumvent opposition to explicit tax transfer schemes first we present a theoretical model that formalizes this hypothesis next we provide evidence consistent with the prediction of the model namely that in u s cities politicians use public employment as such a redistributive device we find that city employment is significantly higher in cities where income inequality and ethnic fragmentation are higher

incumbent performance and electoral control in the pure theory of electoral competition citizens compare the platforms of the candidates and vote for the one whose platform is preferred candidate strategies are identified with promises about future performance in office models of this sort have been developed in both static mckelvey 1975 and dynamic kramer 1977 i settings and all appear to have the property that if the set of alternatives is large enough in some sense equilibrium platforms rarely exist but these models have another feature that is quite as disturbing as their instability in the static setting discussed by mckelvey little attention is paid to the possibility that once in office the politician s preferences may diverge from those of his constituents and that he may therefore choose policies at variance from his platform instead it is simply assumed that promises will be kept whether or not such behavior is congruent with the interest of the officeholder it is sometimes argued that an enforcement mechanism may exist to discipline politicians for failing to keep promises but without a specification of the mechanism it is not obvious that it would be in the interests of the

the political economy of government responsiveness theory and evidence from india the determinants of government responsiveness to its citizens is a key issue in political economy here we develop a model based on the solution of political agency problems having a more informed an politically active electorate strengthens incentives for governments to be responsive this suggests that there is a role both for democratic institutions and the mass media in ensuring that the preferences of citizens are reflected in policy the ideas behind the model are tested on panel data from india we show that public food distribution and calamity relief expenditure are greater controlling for shocks where governments face greater electoral accountability and where newspaper circulation is highest

corruption and entrepreneurship evidence from brazilian municipalities we estimate the effect of corruption on business activity in brazilian municipalities we employ a new measure of corruption based on data from random audits of municipal governments our results suggest that higher levels of corruption are generally associated with reductions in the number of business establishments furthermore we find that these effects become larger over time suggesting that corruption is particularly detrimental over the long run however we also find that the effect of corruption on business activity can be insignificant or even positive conditional on institutional quality being very poor this is consistent with the grease the wheels hypothesis which argues that corruption provides entrepreneurs with means to avoid burdensome regulations and taxes

the politics of ambiguity politicians face a trade off between the policies that maximize their chances of reelection and their most preferred policies or the policies most preferred by the constituency which they represent this paper analyzes this trade off in a dynamic electoral model in which the voters are not fully informed about the preferences of the incumbent first we show that the incumbent follows a policy which is intermediate between the other party s ideal policy and his own ideal policy second we show that often the incumbent has an incentive to choose procedures which make it difficult for voters to pinpoint his preferences with absolute precision thus politicians may prefer to be ambiguous

payment mechanisms and antipoverty programs evidence from a mobile money cash transfer experiment in niger abstractcash transfers have become an increasingly important component of social protection policies in both developed and developing countries while such programs are often implemented electronically in developed countries in many developing countries with weak financial infrastructure such transfers are distributed manually resulting in significant costs to program recipients and the public sector alike the introduction of mobile money systems in many developing countries offers new opportunities for distributing cash transfers using data from a randomized experiment of a mobile money cash transfer program in niger we find evidence of benefits of this new system household diet diversity was 9 16 higher among households who received mobile transfers and children ate an additional one third of a meal per day these results can be partially attributed to time savings associated with mobile transfers as program recipients spent less time traveling to and waiting for their transfer they are also

changes in the living standards of the poor in sri lanka during a period of macroeconomic restructuring abstract beginning in 1977 sri lanka moved away from its welfare oriented economy characterized by extensive government intervention in controlling prices and expensive consumer subsidies toward a more market oriented outward looking liberalized economy investment increased due largely to dramatic increases in the inflow of foreign capital combined with greater deficit financing unemployment declined and the rate of growth of gdp increased the major increase in foreign assistance coupled with deficit spending enabled the government to undertake the ambitious infrastructure projects that stimulated demand however this policy change had deleterious consequences for the poor rapid inflation which resulted in a decline of real wages coupled with dramatic decreases in the value of the food stamp scheme brought about a decline in calorie consumption for lower expenditure groups in addition levels of malnutrition as measured by acute wasting were higher after the policy change

does the internet reduce corruption evidence from u s states and across countries the authors test the hypothesis that the internet is a useful technology for controlling corruption in order to do so the authors develop a novel identification strategy for internet diffusion power disruptions damage digital equipment which increases the user cost of information technology it capital and thus lowers the speed of internet diffusion a natural phenomenon causing power disruptions is lightning activity which makes lightning a viable instrument for internet diffusion using ground based lightning detection censors as well as global satellite data the authors construct lightning density data for the contiguous united states u s states and a large cross section of countries empirically lightning density is a strong instrument for internet diffusion and the authors fourth estimates suggest that the emergence of the internet has served to reduce the extent of corruption across u s states and across the world

choosing the form of government theory and evidence from brazil this article proposes a model to study the main factors that influence the preferences of different population groups between presidential and parliamentary systems ceteris paribus the poor groups in the population tend to prefer a presidential system relatively more than the rich as the lower quality of their local accountability institutions e g local media and judicial courts makes them more vulnerable to the expropriation of rents by their legislators the model is able to account for the main stylised facts emerging from an analysis of referendum data from brazil

voting retrospectively critical junctures and party identification abstract this paper provides evidence for retrospective voting in the very long term by exploiting a unique quasi natural experiment of history we trace the origins of party identification to a critical juncture in the local history of sasun a mountainous region of the ottoman empire located in eastern turkey sasun received vital support from the armenian revolutionary federation arf both during the great massacres against armenians at the end of the 19th century and during the armenian genocide 1915 1917 with the help of the arf some of the survivors from sasun were resettled in various villages in modern day armenia although the party was not active in armenia during seven decades of soviet rule we find that villages with sasun ancestry display substantially higher electoral support for the arf than other villages evidence from first names of current residents and our field work suggest that this differential support can at least in part be explained by historical gratitude and sympathy for the party we offer suggestive evidence to explain why this sympathy might have endured over generations

television and voter turnout i use variation across markets in the timing of television s introduction to identify its impact on voter turnout the estimated effect is significantly negative accounting for between a quarter and a half of the total decline in turnout since the 1950s i argue that substitution away from other media with more political coverage provides a plausible mechanism linking television to voting as evidence for this i show that the entry of television in a market coincided with sharp drops in consumption of newspapers and radio and in political knowledge as measured by election surveys i also show that both the information and turnout effects were largest in off year congressional elections which receive extensive coverage in newspapers but little or no coverage on television

power to the people evidence from a randomized field experiment on community based monitoring in uganda this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled power to the people evidence from a randomized field experiment on community based monitoring in uganda intervention started in 2004 and consisted of a training and a six month follow up in uganda the study observed that localized nongovernmental organizations encouraged communities to be more involved with the state of health service provision and strengthened their capacity to hold their local health providers to account for performance the community based monitoring project increased the quality and quantity of primary health care provision the program led to a significant increase in the weight of infants by 14 z scores and a significant decrease in child mortality by 33 utilization of outpatient services was significantly higher 20 percent in the treatment group and the overall effect across utilization measures is large and significant funding for the study derived from bank netherlands partnership program world bank research committee world bank africa region division swedish international development agency department for research cooperation

shrouded costs of government the political economy of state and local public pensions abstract why do public sector workers receive so much of their compensation in the form of pensions and other benefits this paper presents a political economy model in which politicians compete for taxpayers and government employees votes by promising compensation packages but some voters cannot evaluate every aspect of promised compensation if pension packages are shrouded so that public sector workers better understand their value than ordinary taxpayers then compensation will be highly back loaded in equilibrium the welfare of public sector workers could be improved holding total public sector costs constant if they received higher wages and lower pensions centralizing pension determination has two offsetting effects on generosity more state level media attention helps taxpayers better understand pension costs and that reduces pension generosity but a larger share of public sector workers will vote within the jurisdiction which increases pension generosity a short discussion of pensions in two decentralized states california and pennsylvania and two centralized states massachusetts and ohio suggests that centralization appears to have modestly reduced pensions but as the model suggests this is unlikely to be universal

on the political economy of stabilization abstract joan nelson 1984 includes sri lanka in the period 1977 1982 in a series of case studies of the factors affecting the political acceptability of stabilization and adjustment programs this is misleading because unlike the other countries dealt with sri lanka was not faced with an economic crisis when it accepted large multilateral loans under policy conditionality in fact the economic policies pursued in sri lanka after 1977 reflect the interests and political program of the domestic capitalist class the existence of such a class introduces dimensions to the analysis of the politics of adjustment not dealt with in nelson s framework

natural disasters growth and institutions a tale of two earthquakes abstract we examine the impact of natural disasters on gdp per capita by applying the synthetic control approach and using a within country perspective our analysis encompasses two large scale earthquakes that occurred in two different italian regions in 1976 and 1980 we show that the short term effects are negligible in both regions though they become negative if we simulate the gdp that would have been observed in absence of financial aid in the long term our findings indicate a positive effect in one case and a negative effect in the other largely reflecting divergent patterns of the tfp consistent with these findings we offer further evidence suggesting that a quake and related financial aid might either increase technical efficiency via a disruptive creation mechanism or reduce it by stimulating corruption distorting the markets and deteriorating social capital finally we show that the bad outcome is more likely to occur in regions with lower pre quake institutional quality as a result our evidence suggests that unanticipated local shocks are likely to change long run growth rates exacerbating territorial disparities

the varying political toll of concerns about corruption in good versus bad economic times under what conditions do citizens connect concerns about corruption to their evaluations of sitting executives in contrast to conventional scholarship positing a direct negative relationship between corruption and political support we build on a small but suggestive body of research to argue that this relationship is conditional on economic context we test this claim with national survey data collected in 19 presidential systems as part of the americasbarometer 2010 study using both fixed effects ordinary least squares and hierarchical linear regression analyses we show that individuals facing bad good collective economic conditions apply a higher lower penalty to presidential approval for perceived political corruption this result holds across both an individual level indicator of national economic assessment and a regional economic measure we further test and find less substantial results for the moderating influence of personal economic conditions on the political toll of corruption perce

who monitors the monitor effect of party observers on electoral outcomes abstract we investigate whether electoral monitors who are in charge of assuring the fairness of elections interfere with their outcome more precisely does the monitors presence bias the results in favor of their own preferences to do so we construct a novel dataset from the raw voting records of the 2011 national elections in argentina we exploit a natural experiment to show that electoral observers cause on average a 1 5 increase in the vote count for the observers preferred party which can reach up to 6 for some parties this bias which appears under various electoral rules occurs mainly in municipalities with lower civic capital and weakens the accountability role of elections

state and development the need for a reappraisal of the current literature this essay tries to bring out some of the complexities that are overlooked in the usual treatment of the state in the institutional economics literature and supplement the latter with a discussion of some alternative approaches to looking at the possible developmental role of the state it refers to a broader range of development goals including the structural transformation of the economy and focuses on problems like the resolution of coordination failures and collective action problems the conflicting issues of commitment and accountability and the need for balancing the trade offs they generate some ingredients of state capacity and political coalition building usually missed in the literature the possible importance of rent sharing in a political equilibrium the advantages and problems of political centralization and decentralization and the multidimensionality of state functions that may not be addressed by markets or private firms

electoral competition and special interest politics have fixed positions on some issues but vary their positions on others in order to attract votes and campaign contributions in this context we examine whether special interest groups are governed by an electoral motive or an influence in their campaign giving and how their contributions affect the equilibrium platforms we show that each party is induced to behave as if it were maximizing a weighted sum of the aggregate welfares of informed voters and members of special interest groups the party that is expected to win a majority of seats caters more to the special interests

fighting corruption to improve schooling evidence from a newspaper campaign in uganda what are the most effective ways to increase primary school enrollment and student learning we argue that innovations in governance of social services may yield the highest return since social service delivery in developing countries is often plagued by inefficiencies and corruption we illustrate this by using data from an unusual policy experiment a newspaper campaign in uganda aimed at reducing capture of public funds by providing schools parents with information to monitor local officials handling of a large education grant program the campaign was highly successful and the reduction in capture had a positive effect on enrollment and student learning jel d73 i22 o12

poverty and the political economy of public education spending evidence from brazil a large body of literature has emphasized the elite capture of democratic institutions as the explanation for the low levels of spending on public education in many low income democracies this paper provides an alternative to that longstanding hypothesis motivated by new cross country facts and evidence from brazilian municipalities we hypothesize that many democratic developing countries might invest less in public education spending because poor decisive voters prefer the government to allocate resources elsewhere one possible explanation is that low income voters could instead favor redistributive programs that increase their incomes in the short run such as cash transfers to test for this possibility we design and implement an experimental survey and an incentivized choice experiment in brazil the findings from both interventions support our hypothesis

propensities to engage in and punish corrupt behavior experimental evidence from australia india indonesia and singapore abstract this paper examines cultural differences in individual decision making in a corruption game we define culture as an individual s accumulated experience shaped by the social institutional and economic aspects of the environment in which the individual lives based on experiments run in australia melbourne india delhi indonesia jakarta and singapore we find that there is a greater variation in the propensities to punish corrupt behavior than in the propensities to engage in corrupt behavior across cultures consistent with the existing corruption indices the subjects in india exhibit a higher tolerance of corruption than the subjects in australia however the subjects in singapore have a higher tolerance and the subjects in indonesia have much lower tolerance of corruption than expected we conjecture that this is due to the nature of the recent institutional changes in these two countries we also vary our experimental design to examine the impact of the perceived cost of bribery and find that the results are culture specific

politics information and the urban bias abstract governments in many ldcs skew public resources towards urban sectors despite a majority of citizens residing in rural areas this paper develops a novel political argument for this urban bias phenomenon in a framework where all voters rural and urban have equal voice but differ in their access to information we argue that this difference is sufficient to give governments an incentive to inefficiently over allocate resources towards urban areas the bias is shown to worsen during adverse economic times leading to increased migration we also examine how voter informativeness affects efficiency of the electoral process in weeding out incompetent governments

measuring corruption in china an expenditure based approach using household survey data most existing micro level empirical analyses of corruption rely on administrative records special purpose surveys or field experiments which can be difficult or very costly to obtain in some situations in this paper we apply an expenditure based method of quantifying the extent of corruption in a particular country using household survey data this method utilizes discrepancies between consumption and reported income to measure corruption another contribution of this paper is that it provides the first objective estimate of the extent of corruption in china we use a quadratic clothing expenditure function to estimate the extent of corruption in china in 2002

a free press is bad news for corruption abstract this paper tests the proposition that a free press may be a powerful control on corruption we find evidence of a significant relationship between more press freedom and less corruption in a large cross section of countries this result is robust to specification and sample and the relationship is not sensitive to the choice of a particular measure of corruption or of press freedom furthermore we present evidence which suggests that the direction of causation runs from higher press freedom to lower corruption

can politicians police themselves natural experimental evidence from brazil s audit courts to enhance government accountability reformers have advocated strengthening institutions of horizontal accountability particularly auditing institutions that can punish lawbreaking elected offi

electoral accountability and corruption evidence from the audits of local governments we show that political institutions affect corruption levels we use audit reports in brazil to construct new measures of political cor ruption in local governments and test whether electoral account ability affects the corruption practices of incumbent politicians we find significantly less corruption in municipalities where mayors can get reelected mayors with reelection incentives misappropriate 27 percent fewer resources than mayors without reelection incentives these effects are more pronounced among municipalities with less access to information and where the likelihood of judicial punish ment is lower overall our findings suggest that electoral rules that enhance political accountability play a crucial role in constraining politician s corrupt behavior jel d72 k42 017

popularity shocks and political selection abstract we observe that popularity shocks are crucial for electoral accountability beyond their effects on voters behaviors by focusing on brazilian politics we show that the disclosure of audit reports on the mis use of federal funds by local administrators affects the type of candidates who stand for election when the audit finds low levels of corruption the parties supporting the incumbent select less educated candidates on the contrary parties pick more educated candidates when the audit reveals a high level of corruption these effects are stronger in municipalities that have easier access to local media

the political resource curse this paper studies the effect of additional government revenues on political corruption and on the quality of politicians both with theory and data the theory is based on a political agency model with career concerns and endogenous entry of candidates the data refer to brazil where federal transfers to municipal governments change exogenously at given population thresholds allowing us to implement a regression discontinuity design the empirical evidence shows that larger transfers increase observed corruption and reduce the average education of candidates for mayor these and other more specific empirical results are in line with the predictions of the theory jel d72 d73 h77 o17 o18

the marginal rate of corruption in public programs evidence from india abstract optimal fiscal policy depends on the marginal benefits of public spending in developing countries corrupt officials often embezzle funds so optimal policy should reflect marginal corruption we analyze marginal corruption in the context of a statutory wage increase in india s employment guarantee scheme strikingly workers received none of the increase even though initially they were on average overpaid the data are inconsistent with theories of voice in which the threat of complaints limits corruption but consistent with theories of exit in which outside options in the private sector limit how much rent officials can extract

what wins votes why some politicians opt out of clientelism in a context where clientelism is widespread why do some politicians choose not to condition the delivery of goods and services to citizens on individual political behavior i argue that the answer to this question lies in the heretofore unexamined electoral costs of clientelism clientelism decreases support from nonpoor constituents even while it generates votes from among the poor taking into account these costs and other factors that shape politician incentives i posit that the interaction between political competition and poverty will explain variation in clientelism i test this claim using an original measure of clientelism that assesses mayoral involvement in social policy implementation in argentine municipalities the results of statistical analysis suggest that high levels of political competition are compatible with clientelism when poverty is also high only when high competition is coupled with low rates of poverty does clientelism decline

political rents and voter information in search equilibrium abstract political parties committed to grab rents may run for election and even win if citizens are uninformed but how is the political equilibrium affected if citizens can mitigate this information problem through costly information search we propose a political equilibrium theory with endogenous information search and turnout we show that i the political equilibrium generates political uncertainty characterized by a distribution of rent policies i i the expectation of this rent distribution is inversely u shaped in the information search cost i i i turnout is lower and rents are higher the more proportional is the electoral system

bribery in health care in uganda i examine the role of household permanent income in determining who bribes and how much they bribe in health care in uganda i find that rich patients are more likely than other patients to bribe in public health care doubling household expenditure increases the bribery probability by 1 2 percentage points compared to a bribery rate of 17 the income elasticity of the bribe amount is about 0 37 bribes in the ugandan public sector appear to be fees for service extorted from the richer patients amongst those exempted by government policy from paying the official fees bribes in the private sector appear to be flat rate fees paid by patients who do not pay official fees i do not find evidence that the public health care sector is able to price discriminate less effectively than public institutions with less competition from the private sector

electoral rules and political selection theory and evidence from a field experiment in afghanistan voters commonly face a choice between competent candidates and those with policy preferences similar to their own this article explores how electoral rules such as district magnitude mediate this trade off and affect the composition of representative bodies and the quality of policy outcomes we show formally that anticipation of bargaining over policy causes voters in elections with multiple single member districts to prefer candidates with polarized policy positions over more competent candidates results from a unique field experiment in afghanistan are consistent with these predictions specifically representatives selected by elections with a single multi member district are better educated and exhibit less extreme policy preferences