Revisiting the Relationship Between Corruption and Press Freedom

We use matching methods to explore the causal relationship between the control of corruption and press freedom from 1996-2016. We find strong evidence that corruption reform significantly increases press freedom over both the four-year and eight-year horizon. However, we find little evidence that reform in press freedom influences the control of corruption, hypothesizing that this lack of an effect could be due to the absence of other complementary institutions (e.g., the rule of law and democracy). We find some evidence that press freedom reforms, paired with a strong rule of law system, can reduce corruption. We also find that press freedom reform increases foreign direct investment, suggesting that the perceptions-based measures of corruption may not tell the full story