The question of why firms and managers engage in corruption and related unethical behaviors has attracted significant academic attention with several authors pointing to the importance of social norms and expectations. In this paper, we ask if “legitimate” administrative costs are less of a...

Do firms pay more taxes after formalization? The answer to this question is nontrivial. Tax noncompliance can be a persistent behavior among formerly informal firms. Analyzing the relationship between formalization and tax payments can also be challenging if nonswitching and switching firms have...

We designed a public good laboratory experiment in order to identify the causal relationships between tax evasion and corruption and query whether deterring one of these behaviors may have desirable spillover effects on the other. To do so, we analyse the effects of deterrence when the target is...

This paper investigates the relationship between mining and spatial inequality in Africa during 2001-12. The identification strategy is based on a unilateral causation between mining and district inequality. The findings show that when minerals are aggregated, mining increases district...

Several experimental studies have shown that the crowding-out effect of monitoring may outweigh its disciplining effect through intrinsic motivation destruction, thereby reducing effort. However, most of these experiments use numeric effort tasks that subjects may not be intrinsically motivated...

While incentive framing has been shown to promote workers' effort, little is known about how it affects other dimensions of the employer-employee relationship. This paper examines whether incentive framing can also influence workers propensity to engage in an activity disloyal to their employer:...

This paper investigates the determinants of backward linkages of foreign manufacturing firms in 19 Sub-Saharan African countries. We shed light on the micro and macro level factors which contribute to a higher degree of interactions between foreign subsidiaries and local firms. Our results...

Synopsis of whole book instead of Abstract: This volume provides a comprehensive review of the empirical evidence on corruption generated by recent laboratory and field experiments conducted by economists and political scientists. The first part of the volume reviews the evidence produced by...

Diasporans can contribute to the development of their home countries by investing their capital in existing businesses and/or setting up new ventures in their countries-of-origin. This paper analyzes whether these growingly important investors differ from domestic firms and foreign investors in...

This paper reports on a controlled field experiment on corruption designed to address two important issues: the experimenter's scrutiny and the unobservability of corruption. In the experiment, a grader is offered a bribe along with a demand for a better grade. We find that graders respond more...