A perpetual scarcity of public goods/services produces distortions of an individual’s attitudes towards the cost of bureaucratic procedures: even if bureaucracy is not cumbersome, poverty induces people to perceive honesty as too expensive and to prefer illegal payments because they cannot...

Traditionally, national governance and corruption challenges have been seen as: i) particularly daunting in the poorer countries, with the richer world viewed as exemplary; ii) anchored within a legalistic framework and focused on formal institutions, iii) a challenge within public sectors, and,...

L’approccio tradizionale allo studio della corruzione considera questo fenomeno la diretta conseguenza degli incentivi forniti da norme e vincoli formali agli agenti economici. Il modello sviluppato in questo articolo cerca di evidenziare i limiti di questo approccio, ridimensionando...

Nigeria is going through a difficult political and economic transition after decades of independence.Yet, Nigeria remains a society rich in cultural, linguistic, religious, ethnic and political diversity. Today, the average Nigerian struggles hard to make ends meet; sees himself or herself as...

In this paper we investigate how “civil service” personnel management interacts with bureaucratic discretion to create high capacity, expert bureaucracies populated by policy-motivated agents. We build a model in which bureaucrats may invest in (relationship specific) policy expertise, and...

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...

This paper investigates the relationship between a bureaucracy and mass media industry, and its implications to corruption. We develop a bureaucratic model of corruption with mass media. A representative profit maximizing media firm seeks for corruption news to be printed and sold. Channels...

Important conceptualizations of both interest groups and bureaucratic agencies suggest that these institutions provide legislatures with greater information for use in policy making. Yet little is known about how these information sources interact in the policy process as a whole. In this paper...

We wish to study optimal dynamic nonlinear income taxes. Do real world taxes share some of their features? What policy prescriptions can be made? We study a two period model, where the consumers and government each have separate budget constraints in the two periods, so income cannot be...