We conduct parallel surveys of legislators and citizens in three countries to study their tolerance for corruption. In Italy, Colombia, and Pakistan legislators and citizens respond similarly to hypothetical scenarios involving trade-offs between, for example, probity and efficiency: both...

Why have anti-corruption efforts often failed? Current thinking on corruption has largely overlooked the profound implications of its contested nature, which paradoxically makes it an effective yet highly dysfunctional 'tool of government.' As a tool of government, it helps execute policies and...

Standard cross-national measures of corruption are assembled through surveys. We propose a novel alternative objective measure that consists of the difference between a measure of the physical quantities of public infrastructure and the cumulative price government pays for public capital stocks....

A new measure of cross-national corruption is constructed based on the geographic distribution of public officials involved in cross-border corruption cases. A comparison is made between the Public Administration Corruption Index (PACI) and perception-based measures, considers the extent to...

I consider the “supply-side” of corruption in the context of international bribery, which I define as firms bribing public officials abroad. I present the “Bribe Payers Corruption Index” (BPCI), a non perception-based measure of cross-border corruption, which is coherent with a simple...

A new measure of cross-national corruption is constructed based on the geographic distribution of public officials involved in cross-border corruption cases. A comparison is made between the Public Administration Corruption Index (PACI) and perception-based measures, considers the extent to...

We reconsider the question of what determines corruption at the cross-national level, using new data and methods. Unlike previous studies that rely on perception or survey-based data that have been the subject of criticisms, we employ a new dataset of observed cases of cross-border graft, where...