Governments and private firms try to contain corruption among their staff mostly in a top-down, rules-based approach. They limit discretion, increase monitoring or impose harsher penalties. Principles-based, bottom-up approaches to anticorruption, instead, emphasize the importance of value...

This paper processes responses from households in 66 countries to address differences in the extent to which bribes and gifts are considered acceptable. Levels of acceptance differ substantially from one country to another, but they do not conform to popular expectations: Respondents in rich,...

This study embeds transaction cost analysis into a Law and Economics model to produce general recommendations on how to deter bribery. Governments may deter bribery either by high penalties and risks of detection, potentially supported by leniency given to those who report their infraction...

Corruption among central banks induces distorted policies by, first, increasing the inflation bias and, second, potentially inducing a pro-cyclical adjustment of employment. In response to a negative supply shock a corrupt central banker is tempted to decrease money supply. In this case, he...

The latest Argentinean debt restructuring was the first time the resolution of a modem financial crisis was completely handed over to the private financial markets without official intervention by public institutions. We argue that the resulting harshest haircut for private creditors in history...

The bank lending channel (BLC) has found entrance into standard economic textbooks. But the approach, as presented by Bernanke and Blinder [1988] operates with lopsided loan demand, money demand and money supply functions. This invalidates the idea that potential changes in the supply of loans...

Recent empirical studies claim that, in addition to levels of corruption, investors are deterred by its unpredictability. I claim instead that it is petty corruption that deters investors. I employ seven subcomponents of corruption for a sample of 102 countries that appear in the 2003 Global...

The Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index is a composite index with a focus on cross-section information. The usage of the data in the form of time series has been discouraged in the past, due to changes in the composition of sources. Basing assessments only on sources that...