This study is the first economic experiment that tests the economic significance of the theory of psychological reactance (Brehm, 1966). For this purpose, I design an economic experiment in which subjects are asked to express their valuation of two-choice situations. In one case, subjects are...

Electoral fraud has become an integral part of electoral competition both in established democracies and less-than-democratic regimes. In this paper I study electoral fraud in the non-democratic setting. First, I present evidence of fraud sustainability and growth over the lifetime of...

I analyze a costly voting model of elections, in which the incumbent can stuff the ballot box, to investigate how electoral fraud affects the participation decisions of voters. I find that two stable equilibria may exist: first, a full abstention equilibrium, where the incumbent wins with...

This study provides evidence of a strong link between two channels facilitating rentextraction in public procurement: between concealing the ultimate ownership of contractors and manipulation of the anticipated value of tenders. Using data on more than 15 300 tenders awarded to joint-stock...

This article uses data on Czech public procurement contracts from 2005 - 2010 in order to uncover patterns suggestive of corrupt behavior of procuring officials. Using polynomial regressions and local linear density estimators, the article provides evidence that procurement officials manipulate...

I examine the relation between bureaucratic corruption ('to get things done') and firm performance in Central and Eastern European countries. While previous re- search relies on data from the BEEPS survey, which suffers from excessive non- reporting of corporate performance, I combine the...

In this paper, I analyze the effects of monitoring on an agent’s incentives in a two-period principal-agent model in which the agent decides on his effort and corruptibility. The agent’s type and strategy are unknown to the principal. I compare incentive-compatible wages under three...

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...

We study the effects of loaded instructions in a bribery experiment. We find a strong gender effect: men and women react differently to real-world framing. The treatment effect becomes significant once we allow for genderspecific coefficients. Our paper contributes to the (small) literature on...

I analyze subjects’ sensitivity to parametric change that does not affect the theoretical prediction. I find that increasing the value of an illegal transaction to a briber and reducing the penalties to both culprits leads to more bribes being paid but does not affect the cooperation of the...