How much of a nuisance is greasing the palms? A study on job dedication and attitudes towards corruption reports under answer bias control

This article studies how prior exposure and individual respondent’s work attitudes affect the degree to which corruption is perceived as an obstacle to business operations. Survey questions about sensitive topics like corruption are susceptible to answer bias, for which we control by implementing a randomised response technique. The results suggest that corruption tends to be under-reported. Individuals who are more dedicated to their work report corruption as a bigger obstacle. So did respondents who were previously exposed to corruption. This effect becomes significantly stronger once we control for endogeneity issues related to answer bias that affects past experiences with corruption over and above answer bias that affects reports of corruption as an obstacle to business operations. We find that individual experiences, in addition to contextual variables, shape corruption data available from surveys.