Does political corruption erode civic values and foster dishonest behaviour? This paper tests this hypothesis – using Mexico as an example – by combining data on local government corruption and cheating in school tests. Results show that, following revelations of corruption by local...

Does political corruption erode civic values and foster dishonest behaviour? I test this hypothesis in the context of Mexico, by combining data on local government corruption and cheating in school tests. I find that, following revelations of corruption by local officials, cheating in cognitive...

A large body of recent research claims that diversity hinders general trust, but these studies suffer from omitted variables bias by excluding the institutional context of intergroup relations, specifically segregation. This article re-examines the issue by considering how the residential...

Pandemics are recurring throughout history, and discrimination toward certain social groups often coexists. I study the causal effect of early COVID pandemic events led by the national first case on Chinese cuisine visits to approximate the effect of consumer discrimination toward Chinese...

This paper explores the role of information transmission and misaligned interests across levels of government in explaining variation in the degree of decentralization across countries. Within a two-sided incomplete information principal-agent framework, it analyzes two alternative...

We estimate the impact of fiscal decentralization on different indicators of pollution for more than 80 countries from 1970 to 2000. Our cross country estimates show that fiscal decentralization increases pollution. However, higher quality of institutions can limit the destructive environmental...

The majority of theoretical and empirical studies on the relationship between decentralization and corruption argues that the devolution of power might be a feasible instrument to keep corruption at bay. We argue that this result crucially depends on the possibility to monitor bureaucrat's...