Conventional wisdom depicts corruption as a tax on incumbent firms. This paper challenges this view in two ways. First, by arguing that corruption matters not so much because of the value of the bribe ("tax"), but because of another less studied feature of corruption, namely bribe...

This paper analyses the specific mechanisms through which legal institutions and the Rule of Law affect firm performance using survey evidence from a sample of about 100 Brazilian firms in the textile and electronics industries. The data provide firms' perceptions of whether judicial...