Essays on the economics of corruption /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:Batzilis, Dimitrios, author.
Imprint:2015.
Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2015
Description:1 electronic resource (88 pages)
Language:English
Format: E-Resource Dissertations
Local Note:School code: 0330
URL for this record:http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/10773046
Hidden Bibliographic Details
Other authors / contributors:University of Chicago. degree granting institution.
ISBN:9781321876840
Notes:Advisors: Steven Levitt Committee members: Casey Mulligan; Alberto Simpser.
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Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 76-11(E), Section: A.
English
Summary:In the first section, I use data from audits of municipal governments in Greece to test the hypothesis that electoral competition reduces corruption. Because local election competitiveness is endogenous to local government quality, my identification strategy is based on an instrumental variable approach. Exploiting the fact that voting in the local elections is highly influenced by partisanship, I use the competitiveness of the municipalities in the national elections as an instrument for their competitiveness in the local elections. The IV results suggest that competitive municipalities have substantially lower levels of corruption. Furthermore, I find higher levels of corruption in the southern part of the country, where clientelism has historically been more dominant. I trace the causes of the regional variation of corruption to the persistence of informal institutions that were shaped before and during the transition from foreign rule and absolutism to independence and democracy. The effect of electoral competition on corruption is not contingent on the history of clientelistic politics.
In the second section, I study the propensity of firms to bribe foreign public officials when they do business abroad, using survey data from Transparency International's Bribe Payers Index. Companies from high corruption countries tend to bribe more than their counterparts from low corruption countries, controlling for the level of corruption at the foreign country where they invest or trade. There is no clear evidence that laws against foreign bribery have an effect. Companies from countries that have signed the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions exhibit better corporate conduct overall, but this does not appear to be the case for the full set of countries that have prohibited foreign bribery. I find that foreign bribery laws are equally associated with various types of corruption, whether they fall within the scope of the laws or not. This lack of differential impact casts further doubt on the laws' effectiveness, unless they act as a signal that overall corrupt behavior is not tolerated. The effect of corruption at home on corporate conduct abroad does not change when I control for the presence of foreign bribery laws. I conclude that the reason companies from high corruption countries bribe more when they do business abroad should be attributed to differences in culture and in the accumulation of corruption-specific human capital.