In this paper, we develop a dynamic model of politicians who can engage in corruption. The model offers important insights into what determines corruption and how to design policy to combat it. We estimate the model using data from Brazil to measure voters' willingness to pay for various...

We study how the disclosure of corrupt practices affects the growth of firms involved in illegal interactions with the government using randomized audits of public procurement in Brazil. On average, firms exposed by the anti-corruption program grow larger after the audits, despite experiencing a...

We advance a novel hypothesis that China's recent anti-corruption campaign may have contributed to the recent resurgence of the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China as an unintended consequence. We explore the nexus between the anti-corruption campaign and the SOE resurgence by presenting...

This paper documents novel evidence on the influence of political incentives in the regulatory enforcement of foreign bribery. Using exogenous variation in the timing and geographic location of U.S. Congressional elections, we find that the probability of a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA)...

We use China's recent anti-corruption campaign as a natural experiment to examine the (market expected) equilibrium consequences of (anti-)corruption. We argue that the announcement of inspections of provincial governments by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) on May 17,...

Governments are important financiers of private sector innovation. While these public funds can ease capital constraints and information asymmetries, they can also introduce political distortions. We empirically explore these issues for China, where a quarter of firms' R&D expenditures come from...

Political corruption is considered a major impediment to economic development, and yet it remains pervasive throughout the world. This paper examines the extent to which government audits of public resources can reduce corruption by enhancing political and judiciary accountability. We do so in...

Consistent with reduced expected corruption adding value overall, Chinese shares rise sharply on the December 4th 2012 launch of major anti-corruption reforms, which started by curtailing extravagant spending by or for Party cadres. SOEs gain broadly, consistent with the reform cutting their top...

Poorly functioning, and often corrupt, public procurement procedures are widely faulted for the low quality of infrastructure provision in developing countries. Can electronic procurement (e-procurement), which reduces both the cost of acquiring tender information and personal interaction...

We consider a game between a principal, an agent, and a monitor in which the principal would like to rely on messages by the monitor to target intervention against a misbehaving agent. The difficulty is that the agent can credibly threaten to retaliate against likely whistleblowers in the event...