Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of mayors’ corruption on the municipal interest rate set by lenders. Design/methodology/approach: The sample consists of a panel data for all the Spanish cities with population over 50,000 for 2002–2013 (130 municipalities). In...

This paper analyzes the causes of legal political rent extraction by using a direct measure of it, namely, local top politicians’ wages. In particular, we investigate whether local politicians’ incentives to extract rents by setting their own wages are influenced by the degree of political...