We investigated firm-level perceptions of corruption, based on two enterprise surveys conducted across eight countries of the former Soviet Union. In addition to identifying the perceived major obstacles to business operations, the article looks at whether managers in the agribusiness sector...

This paper re-examines the contribution of five major corruption determinants emphasized by the literature, through an empirical analysis based on a hierarchical modelling of firm-level corruption data. Exploiting a baseline sample of 34,358 bribe reports of firms from 71 developing and...

We use a new machine learning-enabled, social network based measurement technique to assemble a novel dataset of firms' political connections in India. Leveraging this data along with a long panel of detailed financial transactions of firms, we study how political connections matter during an...

Although entrepreneurship plays a key role in economic development, it remains largely unknown. The reason is that it is challenging to measure entrepreneurship objectively and identify its determinants. In this paper, we analyze the effect of a particular feature of the institutional landscape,...

Due to the public good character of protective measures against natural disasters events, their allocation is very often in the realm of bureaucratic and expert agencies. Based on the economic theory of bureaucracy the behavior of a bureau providing the good protection against natural hazards is...

The paper compares the policy choices regarding risk-transfer against low-probability-high-loss events between elected and appointed public officials. Empirical evidence using data on U.S. municipality-level shows that appointed city managers are more likely to adopt federal risk-transfer...

This paper proposes a new model of market structure determination. It demonstrates that market structure need not be the result of ideology, political power, collusion among producers or the nature of the technology. In our setting, it is determined by bureaucrats who maximize their share of the...

This paper introduces hyperbolic discounting into politics. In our model, politicians act according to the preferences of voters in order to be re-elected. As voters' preferences are dynamically inconsistent, the political process results in an allocation of the public budget that is distorted...

This paper studies how income tax rates are determined and how they are related to government corruption in the form of fund capture. A model is presented where rich voters can block redistribution by buying the votes of some poor voters. In equilibrium there is only limited redistribution and...

There is a growing evidence that political corruption is often closely associated with the rent seeking activities of special interest groups. This paper examines the nature of the interaction between the lobbying activities of special interest groups and the incidence of political corruption...