Premium
Does transparency reduce political corruption?
Author(s) -
Strîmbu Octavian,
González Patrick
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
journal of public economic theory
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.809
H-Index - 32
eISSN - 1467-9779
pISSN - 1097-3923
DOI - 10.1111/jpet.12265
Subject(s) - transparency (behavior) , language change , economics , politics , agency (philosophy) , imperfect , margin (machine learning) , microeconomics , perfect information , monetary economics , public economics , computer security , computer science , political science , law , art , philosophy , linguistics , literature , epistemology , machine learning
Does a better monitoring of officials' actions (transparency) lower the incidence of corruption? Using a common agency game with imperfect information, we show that the answer depends on the measure of corruption that one uses. More transparency lowers the prevalence of corruption but raises the average bribe as it motivates the corruptor to bid more aggressively for the agent's favor. We show that transparency affects the prevalence of corruption at the margin through a competitive effect and an efficiency effect.