Prevailing work argues that foreign investment reduces corruption, either by competing down monopoly rents or diffusing best practices of corporate governance. We argue that this theory is too broad-brush and that the empirical work testing it is too heavily drawn from aggregations of total...

Among the concerns faced by countries pondering the costs and benefits of greater economic openness to international capital flows is the worry that new and powerful external actors will exert a corrupting influence on the domestic economy. In this paper, we use a novel empirical strategy, drawn...

Government corruption is more prevalent in poor countries than in rich countries. This paper uses cross-industry heterogeneity in growth rates within Vietnam to test empirically whether growth leads to lower corruption. We find that it does. We begin by developing a model of government...