<span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Traditional political economy has paid primary attention to the structuring of the principal-agent relationship between citizens and politicians and the role of competition and institutions in disciplining political agents. However, as the electoral control of politicians and the credibility of...</span>

AbstractSenior officials in the ministerial bureaucracy are responsible for the coordination of public service activity  and their number has grown enormously since World War II. We study the growth in employment  of this politically  sensitive high-profile occupational group from a political...

Corruption is hidden action aimed at influencing the outcome of an event away from its competitive outcome. It is likely common in all walks of life yet its hidden nature makes it diffcult to detect, while its distortionary influence on resource allocation ensures the importance of trying to...

Regulatory complexity and bureaucracy inefficiencies increase the time needed and the cost of starting a business and therefore reduce the competitiveness of a country. Since the early 1990s Italy, in the same way as other developed countries, has tried to introduce some reforms to boost the...

In this paper the Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) is constructed with Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Partial Least Squares (PLS). Using the SIGI, we test the effects of social institutions related to gender inequality on several development outcomes, such as female education,...

Fiscal transparency has been consistently identified as a key feature of efficient fiscal policy and a prerequisite for good public governance. However, measuring fiscal transparency remains an empirical challenge, and extant literature on developing countries is still sparse. To that end, this...

We build a theoretical model that describes the relationship between income inequality, fiscal redistribution and corruption in China. With between-group econometric model, using the provincial panel data of China from 1997 to 2006, this paper finds strong evidence in support of the propositions...

We study the effects of corruption on the capital structures of firms in 72 countries. Using the Corruption Perception Index, we show that corruption increases the costs of debt and equity. Interestingly, as the level of corruption decreases, these costs become more sensitive to changes in...

There is increasing recognition that corruption has an adverse influence on growth as it distorts both market economy and democracy. However, the existing literature has failed to address countries' characteristics as far as the process of sample selection is concerned. This paper empirically...

Level of economic development has been found to be among the strongest determinants of corruption level in cross-country studies. Those studies use income per capita as a measure of level of development and found that higher level of corruption is associated with lower level of income. We argue...