When Legislators introduce laws that award amnesties to 'low-rank' criminals co- operating with the justice, top criminals may bribe public officials to subvert the law. Legislators should anticipate this reaction and fight it back by introducing policies that bundle amnesties for low-rank...

We study a model that establishes a novel theoretical rationale for the empirically well-documented relation between inequality and corruption. According to our model, inequality can nurture corruption by empowering organized crime because collusion between local police forces and criminal...

Reducing corruption in the telecommunications sector requires licensing reforms. Liberalisation ignored known risks of corruption in both developing countries and in the telecommunications sector, allowing bribery, cronyism and nepotism to enter and to flourish. A discussion of past and present...

Are federal prosecutors influenced by partisan political concerns? We examine this question by analyzing forty years of federal corruption convictions at the state and federal district levels. Our key finding is that state-level corruption convictions fall by 8% in years when a state’s...

In McDonnell v. United States, the Supreme Court constrained the reach of federal anti-corruption law, declared the inevitability and even desirability of representatives aggrandizing favored constituents, and asserted patronage to be a hallmark of democracy. The unanimous decision is the latest...

Empirical evidence on the causes and effects of inequality suggests the existence of a vicious circle of mutually reinforcing inequality and corruption. Despite the broad empirical evidence, there are only a few formal theoretical models on these dynamics. Relying on a game-theoretic approach,...

In a series of recent, high-profile cases, the DOJ has successfully pursued criminal charges against foreign officials in American courts. But instead of charging these officials with accepting corrupt payments, the DOJ has prosecuted them for exploiting the U.S. financial system to launder...

Can machine learning support better governance? In the context of Brazilian municipalities, 2001-2012, we have access to detailed accounts of local budgets and audit data on the associated fiscal corruption. Using the budget variables as predictors, we train a tree-based gradient-boosted...

This study examined attitudes on the ethics of bribe taking in four European countries – France, Great Britain, Italy and Germany. Nineteen demographic variables (gender, age, marital status, etc.) were also examined, and most mean scores were found to be significantly different. Although most...

Despite strong traditions of research into corruption and into telecommunications policy and regulation, the two are almost never combined, an absence that remains unexplained. One possibility is that it is “dangerous” in terms of physical harm, financial harm from defamation law suits or...