This paper aims to understand how corruption responds to an income loss. We exploit an unexpected 25% wage cut incurred in 2010 by all Romanian public sector employees, including the public education staff. We investigate a corruptible high-stake exam taking place shortly after the wage...

This paper aims to understand how corruption responds to financial incentives and, in particular, it is an attempt to identify the causal impact of a wage loss on the prevalence of corruption in the education sector. Specifically, we exploit the unexpected wage cut in May 2010 that affected all...

Recent literature exploring fetal shocks has focused on the effects of exogenous, but rather rare and violent events (e.g., military conflicts, natural disasters, terrorist attacks) and found that in utero experience has scaring, life lasting consequences. In this paper we consider the effect of...