Does corruption ease the burden of regulation? We test this question using survey data on business managers’ experience of dealing with regulation and corruption. We find that there is substantial within-country variation in the burden of regulation and that corruption is associated with worse...

Using firm-level data, we find that countries with greater press freedom have significantly lower incidences of bribery involving public officials. In particular, we find that a free press is associated with a substantial reduction in the percentage of firms that report corruption during...

It is well understood that corruption can change the incentives to engage in political violence. However, the scope for corruption to change attitudes towards the permissibility of violence has received less attention. Drawing on Moral Foundations Theory, we argue that experiences of corruption...

This paper examines the relationship between corruption and infrastructure at both the country and regional level using the World Bank’s Enterprise Surveys data. A statistically significant and considerable relationship is established between the measure of corruption in the macro data and the...

There are only a handful of studies that examine public support for the IMF and World Bank. At the individual level, evaluations of the economy feature prominently in these studies. Utilizing data from the Afrobarometer study, we find that evaluations of the economy, ideology and a range of...

Using data from the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys, we test two interesting results that emerge from the theoretical model presented in Shleifer and Vishny (1994) that studies bargaining between politicians and managers of state-owned firms. Shleifer and Vishny's model suggests that firms with...

This paper documents that standard measures of corruption based on the perceptions of experts and opinion surveys and measures based on the experiences of firms can in some cases lead to quite different conclusions as to how much of a problem corruption is in a country. We then show that while...

Are women less corrupt in business? We revisit this question using firm-level data from the World Bank’s Enterprise Surveys, which measure firms’ experience of corruption and the gender of their owners and top managers. We find that women in positions of influence are associated with less...

The links between corruption and the shadow economy have mostly been studied empirically at the country level. This paper contributes to this literature by examining the relationship at the sub-national level. Using World Bank Enterprise Survey data, we find that sub-national units in which more...

In this paper we use data from the Afrobarometer surveys to demonstrate that there is an undesirable spill-over from petty corruption in the public sector to trust in private sector institutions. Our results show that experiencing bribery in the course of one’s interactions with the public...