The internet and other large textual databases contain billions of documents: is there useful information in the number of documents written about different topics? We propose, based on the premise that the occurrence of a phenomenon increases the likelihood that people write about it, that the...

Politicians can use the public sector to give jobs to cronies, at the expense of the efficiency of those organisations and general welfare. Motivated by a simple model of cronyism that predicts spikes in appointments to state-owned firms near elections, we regress 1980-2008 monthly hirings...

This paper shows that cross country differences in the generosity and the quality of the welfare state are associated with differences in the trustworthiness of their citizens. We show that generous, transparent and efficient welfare states in Scandinavian countries are based on the civicness of...

Although the theoretical literature often uses lobbying and corruption synonymously, the empirical literature associates lobbying with the preferred mean for exerting influence in developed countries and corruption with the preferred one in developing countries. This paper challenges these...

This paper contributes to the literature on competition and corruption, by drawing on records from Calciopoli, a judicial inquiry carried out in 2006 on corruption in the Italian soccer league. Unlike previous studies, we can estimate the determinants of match rigging and use this information in...

We address the impact of corruption in a developing economy in the context of an empirically relevant hold-up problem - when a foreign firm sinks an investment to provide infrastructure services. We focus on the structure of the economy's bureaucracy, which can be centralized or decentralized,...

"Using cross-country and Peruvian data, I show that victims of misfortune, particularly crime victims, are much more likely than non-victims to bribe public officials. Misfortune increases victims' demand for public services, raising bribery indirectly, and also increases victims' propensity to...

The monopoly position of the public bureaucracy in providing public services allows government employees to acquire rents. Those rents can involve higher wages, monetary and non-monetary fringe benefits (e.g. pensions and staffing), and/or bribes. We propose a direct measure to capture the total...

This paper analyzes the influence of the shadow economy on corruption and vice versa. We hypothesize that corruption and shadow economy are substitutes in high income countries while they are complements in low income countries. The hypotheses are tested for a cross-section of 120 countries and...

This study is the first to provide a systematic measure of bribery using micro-level data on reported earnings, household spending and asset holdings. We use the compensating differential framework and the estimated sectoral gap in reported earnings and expenditures to identify the size of...