Using a theoretical model of two-candidate political competition under probabilistic voting, I study the effectiveness of the following anti-corruption reforms: (i) higher wages for politicians, (ii) higher penalties for political corruption, and (iii) constitutional constraints on the tax rates...

The monopoly position of the public bureaucracy in providing public services allows government employees to acquire rents. Those rents can involve higher wages, monetary and non-monetary fringe benefits (e.g. pensions and staffing), and/or bribes. We propose a direct measure to capture the total...

The study analyses the concept of irregularity and its theoretical and legal manifestations. Irregularity in Hungarian law is in use in more than one sense; one of these is based on the regulations of the European Union. The EU’s regulation of irregularity and domestic legal practice contain...

We report results from a randomized policy experiment designed to test whether increased audit risk deters rent extraction in local public procurement and service delivery in Brazil. Our estimates suggest that temporarily increasing annual audit risk by about 20 percentage points reduced the...

This study considers the effect that judicial and police efficiency exercised on crime in 25 of the 33 political-administrative divisions in Colombia during the period 2000- 2011. Specifically, the study seeks to determine whether the reduction of crime was the result of increases in the cost of...

The monopoly position of the public bureaucracy in providing public services allows government employees to acquire rents. Those rents can involve higher wages, monetary and non-monetary fringe benefits (e.g. pensions and staffing), and/or bribes. We propose a direct measure to capture the total...

Deterrence of illegal activities is frequently carried out by many atomistic auditors (tax auditors, law enforcement agents, etc.). Not much is known either normatively about the best way to incentivize atomistic auditors, nor positively about what these incentives actually look like in real...

Local communities are suffering extreme financial and economic hardships due to falling revenues and increased expenditures and therefore must seek alternate means to balance their budgets. A very large expenditure that must be borne by every community is the administration of the Criminal...

We show that isolated capital cities are robustly associated with greater levels of corruption across US states, in line with the view that this isolation reduces accountability. We then provide direct evidence that the spatial distribution of population relative to the capital affects different...

In 2013 the State Audit Office of Hungary assessed the level of the public sector integrity the third time. The results of the surveys have shown that at the examined institutions corruption risks are mainly connected with the public procurements processes and the utilization of EU subsidies. At...