We study how policies limiting the spending capacity of local governments may reduce corruption. We exploit the extension of one such policy, the Domestic Stability Pact (DSP), to small Italian municipalities. The DSP led to a decrease in both recorded corruption rates and corruption charges per...

The aim of this paper is to study the effect of local corruption on political participation which is mediated by the press. Focusing on Italy, we generate a daily measure of exposition to local corruption screening articles of main Italian press agency. Applying an event-study methodology on...

Can machine learning support better governance? In the context of Brazilian municipalities, 2001-2012, we have access to detailed accounts of local budgets and audit data on the associated fiscal corruption. Using the budget variables as predictors, we train a tree-based gradient-boosted...