Large and persistent differences in corruption across comparable countries is a challenging research issue. Even more intriguing are such differences across regions within the same country, because the typically considered socioeconomic and governance characteristics are generally more similar...

Among the questions which this paper addresses are, how does a culture of corruption perpetuate itself over time, what effects do different features of the economy have on the phenomenon of corruption, and why the culture of corruption might or might not alter over time? A central feature of the...