Why have anti-corruption efforts often failed? Current thinking on corruption has largely overlooked the profound implications of its contested nature, which paradoxically makes it an effective yet highly dysfunctional 'tool of government.' As a tool of government, it helps execute policies and...

We reconsider the question of what determines corruption at the cross-national level, using new data and methods. Unlike previous studies that rely on perception or survey-based data that have been the subject of criticisms, we employ a new dataset of observed cases of cross-border graft, where...

I consider the “supply-side” of corruption in the context of international bribery, which I define as firms bribing public officials abroad. I present the “Bribe Payers Corruption Index” (BPCI), a non perception-based measure of cross-border corruption, which is coherent with a simple...

The problem of measuring changes in corruption internationally is significantly more daunting than that of estimating their levels. We compute trends in corruption for groups of geographically proximate countries, based on the geographic distribution of cases of cross-border bribes, and confirm...