Florian Dorn prepared this study during his doctoral studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich (LMU). The study was completed in September 2020 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics. This dissertation contributes to the empirics of public economics and...

Conflicts of interest within hierarchic government organizations regarding the importance of fiscal discipline create the need for institutions that curb the bargaining power of units in charge of implementing policy and align their incentives to the interests of the whole organization. We...

How do corruption and the state apparatus interact, and how are they connected to the political and economic dimensions of state capacity? Motivated by historians' analysis of powerful empires, we build a model that emphasizes the corrosive effect of corruption on state power. Under general...

This paper re-examines the contribution of five major corruption determinants emphasized by the literature, through an empirical analysis based on a hierarchical modelling of firm-level corruption data. Exploiting a baseline sample of 34,358 bribe reports of firms from 71 developing and...

Building state capacity is uniquely challenging in fragile states. We report results from a randomized evaluation of a major Afghan government initiative to increase capacity by modernizing its payroll. The reform, which required teachers to biometrically register and receive salary payments via...

When a government creates an agency to gather information relevant to policymaking, it faces two critical organizational questions: whether the agency should be given authority to decide on policy or merely supply advice, and what should the policy goals of the agency be. Existing literature on...

We study the effects of loaded instructions in a bribery experiment. We find a strong gender effect: men and women react differently to real-world framing. The treatment effect becomes significant once we allow for genderspecific coefficients. Our paper contributes to the (small) literature on...

We find that new states are perceived to be more corrupt even though businesses do not report more bribery in newer states. This is suggestive of an unearned, and likely high, reputational cost to being a new state. These findings hold over a number of specifications that include additional...

We ask whether, as many seem to think, corruption worsens, and judicial accountability improves, inequality, and investigate this empirically using data from 145 countries 1960.2014. We relate perceived corruption and de facto judicial accountability to gross-income inequality and consumption...

I analyze subjects’ sensitivity to parametric change that does not affect the theoretical prediction. I find that increasing the value of an illegal transaction to a briber and reducing the penalties to both culprits leads to more bribes being paid but does not affect the cooperation of the...