This paper explores the role played by press regulation in selecting the information mass media deliver to voters. The focus is on whether press regulation can reduce political corruption and increase voters' welfare. By endogenizing the response of the voters to information from the media, we...

Well-functioning institutions, both formal (i.e. rule of law) and informal (i.e. trust), facilitate economic exchange. To investigate the nature of the relationship between formal and informal institutions, we analyze bilateral trade patterns in a sample of 16 European countries between...

We study experimentally whether anti-corruption policies with a focus on bribery might be insufficient to uncover more subtle ways of gaining an unfair advantage. In particular, we investigate whether an implicit agreement to exchange favors between a decision-maker and a lobbying party serves...

We investigate the relationship between economic freedom and corruption using data from U.S. states covering almost a quarter of a century. Our study advances the existing literature on several fronts. First, instead of using subjective cross-country corruption indices assembled by various...

We analyze the determinants of the origin of domestic and international terrorism in a large panel data set of 159 countries spanning from 1970 to 2007. We show that terror increases with GDP per capita, a higher polity score measuring a more open and competitive political system and experiences...

We apply a standard specification of the causes of corruption to a large sample of countries to investigate the effect of internet awareness about corruption on prevalence and perceptions of corruption. The main hypothesis is that greater corruption awareness acts as a corruption deterrent. A...

Some past theoretical models have predicted that bribes paid by firms to government officials are greater under a decentralized bureaucracy where a firm faces numerous officials. A “tragedy of the commons” arises where officials set bribe payments too high and so drive firms out of the...