Do better managers bribe less? Cross-national and experimental evidence
Edmund Malesky et al.
What the paper says
Abstract Work on the relationship between regulation and bribery suggests that bribes are a joint function of the demands of bureaucrats and the supply of business managers willing to pay them. However, due to biases in measurement, empirical work has concentrated on country-level, demand-side drivers, while research on factors that lead businesses to bribe remains theoretically rich but empirically underdeveloped. We contribute to the burgeoning work on the supply of bribery with a formal model that predicts poorly managed firms may strategically initiate bribes because resource constraints and/or poor service quality necessitate shortcuts in regulatory compliance. To test these theories, we present two connected studies. The first demonstrates that the predictions are consistent with cross-national business survey data. The second, a field experiment, randomly assigned firms to management training courses in Vietnam. Using detailed accounting books, we find that firms in the management course paid monthly bribes less than one-fifth the size ($227 less) of the placebo group, and, consistent with our predictions, had higher levels of regulatory compliance.
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.