Greasing the wheels? The impact of regulations and corruption on firm entry

This paper investigates the question of whether corruption might ‘grease the wheels’ of an economy. We investigate whether and to what extent the impact of regulations on entrepreneurship is dependent on corruption. We first test whether regulations robustly deter firm entry into markets. Our results show that the existence of a larger number of procedures required to start a business, as well as larger minimum capital requirements are detrimental to entrepreneurship. Second, we test whether corruption reduces the negative impact of regulations on entrepreneurship in highly regulated economies. Our empirical analysis, covering a maximum of 43 countries over the 2003–2005 period, shows that corruption facilitates firm entry in highly regulated economies. For example, the ‘greasing’ effect of corruption kicks in at around 50 days required to start a new business. Our results thus provide support for the ‘grease the wheels’ hypothesis

Global economic crisis and corruption

© 2014, Springer Science+Business Media New York. We study the effects of the 2008–2009 global economic crisis on the household experience of bribing public officials. The data come from the Life in Transition-2 survey, conducted in 2010 in 30 post-socialist economies of Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. We find that households hit by crisis are more likely to bribe and, among people who bribe, crisis victims bribe a wider range of public officials than non-victims. The crisis victims are also more likely to pay bribes because public officials ask them to do so and less likely because of gratitude. The link between crisis and bribery is stronger in the poorest countries of the region. Our findings support the conjecture that public officials misuse sensitive information about crisis victims to inform bribe extortion decisions

Investing in Threatened Species Conservation: Does Corruption Outweigh Purchasing Power?

In many sectors, freedom in capital flow has allowed optimization of investment returns through choosing sites that provide the best value for money. These returns, however, can be compromised in countries where corruption is prevalent. We assessed where the best value for money might be obtained for investment in threatened species that occur at a single site, when taking into account corruption. We found that the influence of corruption on potential investment decisions was outweighed by the likely value for money in terms of pricing parity. Nevertheless global conservation is likely to get best returns in terms of threatened species security by investing in “honest” countries than in corrupt ones, particularly those with a high cost of living

Does emigration reduce corruption?

© 2017, The Author(s). We study the effects of emigration on bribery experience and attitudes towards corruption in the migrants’ countries of origin. Using data from the Gallup Balkan Monitor survey and instrumental variable analysis, we find that having relatives abroad reduces the likelihood of bribing public officials, renders bribe-taking behavior by public officials less acceptable, and reduces the likelihood of being asked for bribes by public officials. Receiving monetary remittances does not change the beneficial effects regarding bribe paying and attitudes toward corruption; however, remittances counteract the beneficial effect on bribe solicitations by public officials. Overall, our findings support the conjecture that migration contributes to the transfer of norms and practices from destination to source countries

Political transfer cycles

Contains fulltext : 74901.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)17 p

"Replication Data for Global Racist Contagion Following Donald Trump's Election"

Exploiting the coincidence between the timing of U.S. presidential elections and the fieldwork period of the European Social Survey, we show that Donald Trump's win significantly increased self-reported racial bias in policy attitudes outside the U.S. We document that the opposite occurred following Barack Obama's first election in 2008, while no effect occurred when he or George W. Bush were reelected in 2012 and 2004. We show that the increase in self-reported racial bias is not driven by welfare-related immigration concerns, campaign effects, or bandwagon effects, suggesting a decrease in the social desirability of racial equality

What have we done?! The impact of choosing and studying different academic disciplines on beliefs and values

In this paper, we examine the effect of studying business on the beliefs and values of students, carefully distinguishing between self-selection in the discipline and socialization during the first year of study. Using a survey of students in a leading Belgian business school, we observe significant differences between business students and students from other disciplines at the start of their first year in both their beliefs and values. We also discover that these differences persist or are reinforced at the end of the year. Moreover, we find changes in values of business students that take only one year to manifest. Furthermore, we find that business students over the course of the first year change their beliefs more than students from other disciplines. Accordingly, we report evidence of self-selection and socialization effects on both the values and beliefs of a typical business student. Moreover, we observe that while some values and beliefs of business students change over time, we do not observe changes for economics students. This suggests that the effect of studying business is not entirely driven by the role of economics in business studies.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe