This paper examines whether access to information enhances political accountability. Based upon the results of Brazil …'s recent anti-corruption program that randomly audits municipal expenditures of federally-transferred funds, it estimates the … effects of the disclosure of local government corruption practices upon the re-election success of incumbent mayors. Comparing …

Conventional wisdom depicts corruption as a tax on incumbent firms. This paper challenges this view in two ways. First …, by arguing that corruption matters not so much because of the value of the bribe ("tax"), but because of another less … studied feature of corruption, namely bribe unavoidability. Second, we argue that the social costs of corruption arise not …

Two major earthquakes which struck northwestern Turkey in 1999 exposed rampant corruption involving construction and … zoning code violations. The government's relief efforts were tainted by corruption as well, and exhibited a great deal of … parties were responsible for the construction of the shoddy buildings, and for the corruption and mismanagement related to …

accountability and reduce corruption. In this paper we show that electoral discipline may be ineffective in reducing corruption when … competition on corruption. We show that in equilibrium, corruption has a U-shaped relationship with electoral competition. If the … election is safe for the incumbent (low competition) or if it is extremely fragile (high competition) then corruption is higher …

implications of the theory and identify the causal effect of larger federal transfers on political corruption and the observed …The paper studies the effect of additional government revenues on political corruption and on the quality of … politicians, both with theory and data. The theory is based on a version of the career concerns model of political agency with …

student outcomes. We use data from the auditing of Brazil's local governments to construct objective measures of corruption …This paper examines if money matters in education by looking at whether missing resources due to corruption affect … of corruption across municipalities and controlling for student, school, and municipal characteristics, we find a …