In an imperfect world, it is very challenging to control corruption of top executives and boards of directors. The general rule is that members of the top management and boards of directors are compensated with large sums of annual bonuses, depending on the corporate financial performance of the...

This paper develops and tests two efficiency wage models of corruption in the civil service. Under fair wage models, civil service wages are an important determinant of corruption. Under shirking models, the level of wages is of secondary importance, as potential bribes dwarf wage income. The...

In the late 1990s, it was announced that Australia would introduce legislation to respond to an OECD Convention for criminalizing bribery of foreign public officials. This was part of a coordinated international OECD initiative. The US had already addressed such issues two decades earlier under...

This paper employs a novel dataset on government wages to investigate the relationship between government remuneration policy and corruption. Our dataset, as derived from national household or labor surveys, is more reliable than the data on government wages as used in previous research. When...

This paper develops and tests two efficiency wage models of corruption in the civil service. Under fair wage models, civil service wages are an important determinant of corruption. Under shirking models, the level of wages is of secondary importance, as potential bribes dwarf wage income. The...

The paper uses a new country-level, panel data set to study the effect of public sector wages on corruption. The results show that wage inequality in the public sector is an important determinant of the effectiveness of anti-corruption policies. Increasing the wages of public officials could...

The paper discusses the impact of corruption on the probability of violent conflict events and traces the shifts in the composition of corrupt transactions during and in the aftermath of violent conflicts in an informal way. So far there has been little interaction between empirical corruption...

In transition and developing countries, we observe rather high levels of corruption even they have democratic political systems. This is surprising from a political economy perspective, as a majority of the people generally suffers from high corruption levels. Our model based on the fact that...

This paper explores official trade data to identify patterns of smuggling in international trade. Our main measure of interest is the difference in matched partner trade statistics, i.e., the extent to which the recorded export value in the source country deviates from the reported import value...

Performance-based aid has been proposed as an alternative to the failed traditional approach whereby donors make aid conditional on the reform promises of recipient countries. However, hardly any empirical evidence exists on whether ex post rewards are effective in inducing reforms. We attempt...