IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/umc/wpaper/1322.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Measuring Public Corruption in the United States: Evidence from Administrative Records of Federal Prosecutions

Author

Abstract

A growing empirical literature examines the causes and consequences of public corruption in the United States; however, most of these studies measure corruption using data on federal convictions that is of dubious quality and provenance. We document these concerns and describe an alternative data source that provides more reliable and detailed information on corruption prosecutions and convictions by type of state official and even by lead charge. We employ these data to construct a taxonomy of public corruption that dispels some popular and academic misconceptions. Our findings call into question the lessons from previous empirical research; earlier studies of the causes and consequences of corruption in the states should be re-examined with more appropriate measures of corruption convictions.

Suggested Citation

  • Jeffrey Milyo & Adriana Cordis, 2013. "Measuring Public Corruption in the United States: Evidence from Administrative Records of Federal Prosecutions," Working Papers 1322, Department of Economics, University of Missouri.
    • Handle: RePEc:umc:wpaper:1322
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://drive.google.com/file/d/10EVBC0IMVM-rcvnF2xB44HlnGltNXg7A/view?usp=sharing
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Filipe R. Campante & Quoc-Anh Do, 2014. "Isolated Capital Cities, Accountability, and Corruption: Evidence from US States," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 104(8), pages 2456-2481, August.
    2. Kevin M. Murphy & Andrei Shleifer & Robert W. Vishny, 2008. "Why Is Rent-Seeking So Costly to Growth?," Springer Books, in: Roger D. Congleton & Kai A. Konrad & Arye L. Hillman (ed.), 40 Years of Research on Rent Seeking 2, pages 213-218, Springer.
    3. Peter T. Leeson & Russell S. Sobel, 2008. "Weathering Corruption," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 51(4), pages 667-681, November.
    4. James E. Alt & David Dreyer Lassen, 2003. "The Political Economy of Institutions and Corruption in American States," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 15(3), pages 341-365, July.
    5. Jeffrey Milyo & Adriana Cordis, 2013. "Do State Campaign Finance Reforms Reduce Public Corruption?," Working Papers 1301, Department of Economics, University of Missouri.
    6. Kaufmann, Daniel & Kraay, Aart & Mastruzzi, Massimo, 2010. "The worldwide governance indicators : methodology and analytical issues," Policy Research Working Paper Series 5430, The World Bank.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Adriana S. Cordis, 2014. "Corruption and the Composition of Public Spending in the United States," Public Finance Review, , vol. 42(6), pages 745-773, November.
    2. Jamie Bologna & Amanda Ross, 2015. "Corruption and Entrepreneurship: Evidence from a Random Audit Program," Working Papers 15-05, Department of Economics, West Virginia University.
    3. Andrew Mell & Simon Radford & Seth Alexander Thevoz, 2015. "Is There a Market for Peerages? Can Donations Buy You a British Peerage? A Study in the Link Between Party Political Funding and Peerage Nominations, 2005-14," Economics Series Working Papers 744, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
    4. Grooms, Katherine K., 2015. "Enforcing the Clean Water Act: The effect of state-level corruption on compliance," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 73(C), pages 50-78.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Damm, Jason & McNulty, James E., 2022. "Attorney discipline, the quality of legal systems and economic growth within the United States," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 84(C), pages 516-533.
    2. Agostino, Mariarosaria, 2024. "Extreme weather events and firms’ energy practices. The role of country governance," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 192(C).
    3. Flamini, Alessandro & Jahanshahi, Babak & Mohaddes, Kamiar, 2021. "Illegal drugs and public corruption: Crack based evidence from California," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 69(C).
    4. Campante, Filipe R. & Do, Quoc-Anh & Guimaraes, Bernardo, 2012. "Isolated Capital Cities and Misgovernance: Theory and Evidence," Working Paper Series rwp12-058, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government.
    5. Filipe R. Campante & Quoc-Anh Do, 2014. "Isolated Capital Cities, Accountability, and Corruption: Evidence from US States," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 104(8), pages 2456-2481, August.
    6. Hsien-Yi Chen & Sheng-Syan Chen, 2023. "Can credit default swaps exert an enduring monitoring influence on political integrity?," Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, Springer, vol. 60(2), pages 445-469, February.
    7. Leonid Polishchuk & Georgiy Syunyaev, 2015. "Ruling elites’ rotation and asset ownership: implications for property rights," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 162(1), pages 159-182, January.
    8. James, Alexander & Rivera, Nathaly M., 2022. "Oil, politics, and “Corrupt Bastards”," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 111(C).
    9. Agarwal, Sumit & Qian, Wenlan & Seru, Amit & Zhang, Jian, 2020. "Disguised corruption: Evidence from consumer credit in China," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 137(2), pages 430-450.
    10. Joël Cariolle & Petros G Sekeris, 2021. "How export shocks corrupt: theory and evidence," Working Papers hal-03164648, HAL.
    11. Chen, Minghua & Jeon, Bang Nam & Wang, Rui & Wu, Ji, 2015. "Corruption and bank risk-taking: Evidence from emerging economies," Emerging Markets Review, Elsevier, vol. 24(C), pages 122-148.
    12. Natkhov Timur & Polishchuk Leonid, 2012. "Institutions and the Allocation of Talent," HSE Working papers WP BRP 15/EC/2012, National Research University Higher School of Economics.
    13. Noel Campbell & Adriana S. Cordis, 2014. "Expected corruption and business formation," Journal of Entrepreneurship and Public Policy, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 3(2), pages 292-305, October.
    14. Kanat Abdulla, 2021. "Corrosive effects of corruption on human capital and aggregate productivity," Kyklos, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 74(4), pages 445-462, November.
    15. Dwumfour, Richard Adjei & Ntow-Gyamfi, Matthew, 2018. "Natural resources, financial development and institutional quality in Africa: Is there a resource curse?," Resources Policy, Elsevier, vol. 59(C), pages 411-426.
    16. El Ghoul, Sadok & Guedhami, Omrane & Wei, Zuobao & Zhu, Yicheng, 2023. "Does public corruption affect analyst forecast quality?," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 154(C).
    17. Jeffrey Milyo & Adriana Cordis, 2013. "Do State Campaign Finance Reforms Reduce Public Corruption?," Working Papers 1301, Department of Economics, University of Missouri.
    18. Lee, Hanol & Moumbark, Toure, 2022. "Climate change, corruption, and business bribes in South Asia," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 47(PB).
    19. Toke S. Aidt, 2011. "Corruption and Sustainable Development," Chapters, in: Susan Rose-Ackerman & Tina Søreide (ed.), International Handbook on the Economics of Corruption, Volume Two, chapter 1, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    20. Hinh Khieu & Nam H. Nguyen & Hieu V. Phan & Jon A. Fulkerson, 2023. "Political Corruption and Corporate Risk-Taking," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 184(1), pages 93-113, April.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    corruption; disaster assistance; FEMA;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H5 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies
    • D7 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:umc:wpaper:1322. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chao Gu (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/edumous.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.