Theoretical work on disciplining corrupt agents has emphasized the role of expected future rents?for example, efficiency wages. Yet taken seriously this approach implies that illicit future rents should also deter corruption. We study this "golden goose" effect in the context of a statutory wage...

We investigate the influence of a judge’s objective function on the type of sanctions used for enforcing environmental standards. We focus on the difference between monetary and non-monetary penalties. Therefore, we examine the extent to which judges take social costs of sanctions into account...

Relying on a small natural field experiment conducted by the Norwegian Environmental Protection Agency, I estimate effects of three fundamental elements of most monitoring and enforcement practices: self-reporting, audit frequency and specific deterrence. I find evidence of under-reporting of...

We show that isolated capital cities are robustly associated with greater levels of corruption across US states, in line with the view that this isolation reduces accountability. We then provide direct evidence that the spatial distribution of population relative to the capital affects different...

Using a panel data at the provincial level during the period of 1989–2004, this paper examines the effects of social and economic factors such as government scale, privatization, openness, and education on regional corruption. Applying a fixed-effect model and IV estimation, we find that...

We report results from a randomized policy experiment designed to test whether increased audit risk deters rent extraction in local public procurement and service delivery in Brazil. Our estimates suggest that temporarily increasing annual audit risk by about 20 percentage points reduced the...

Modernity is usually thought as a complex society with clearly differentiated spheres of everyday life. It means, in particular, that economic rules do not interfere with the norms structuring political, social, scientific and other interactions. The complex, differentiated society sharply...