This study investigates a government's contracting decision to audit or outsource the provision of a public good given a potential hidden bribe and information asymmetries. The key findings are the following. First, the bribe and price of the public good are increasing in the corruptibility of...

The growth of rating and ranking systems is one of the dominant trends in contemporary public services reform. They are recent innovations in governance, and often highly controversial. There is active debate about the meaningfulness of the data made available to the public, and about the effect...

This paper analyses the erosion of democracy in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe from the perspective of political economy. We posit that the coinciding effects of political marketing and the state financing of parties represent a peculiar mix of liberal and étatist principles that...

This paper examines arguments for and against the centralization of regulation,using the wireless communications industry as a case study. Several factors suggest that the burden increasingly ought to fall on proponents of decentralization. Scale, scope and network efficiencies are growing in...

We find evidence that transparency interventions can reduce corrupt behavior in circumstances which theory predicts are least favorable to them and that are often associated with “grand corruption”: when corrupt actors are few and politically influential; their behavior imposes small costs...

This paper presents a new model of political competition where candidates belong to factions. Before elections, factions compete to direct local public goods to their local constituencies. The model of factional competition delivers a rich set of implications relating the internal organization...

(english) Who are the most prone to pay bribes? Who are angled for bribes? Who pay? This article explores these issues in sub-Saharan Africa, an area of the world where corruption is widespread. This paper empirical basis is a rich collection of comparable data provided by the Afrobarometer...

This paper aims at giving a theoretical background to the, some- times observed, puzzling inverse correlation between the degree of de- centralization and economic growth. We provide evidence that there is some interaction between decentralization and corruption in ex- plaining growth. Within an...

Who are the most prone to pay bribes? Who are angled for bribes? Who pay? This article explores these issues in sub-Saharan Africa, an area of the world where corruption is widespread. This paper empirical basis is a rich collection of comparable data provided by the Afrobarometer surveys...

Quels sont les individus les plus enclins à recourir à la corruption ? A qui demande-t-on des pots-devin ? Qui en payent ? Cet article explore ces questions à partir d’un riche corpus d’enquêtes-ménages comparables réalisées dans continent où la corruption sévit avec beaucoup...