Romain Ferrali

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job market seminar

Romain Ferrali

New York University Abu Dhabi
How to reduce bureaucratic corruption? Unpacking Brazilian anti-corruption audits
Co-écrit avec
Kim Galileu
à distance
Date(s)
Vendredi 15 janvier 2021| 11:30 - 12:45
Résumé

Under which conditions do anti-corruption policies effectively reduce bureau-cratic corruption? Previous studies find that anti-corruption audits are effective in disciplining politicians, but their impact on bureaucrats is unclear. We leverage 10 years of randomized audits and the careers of 275 thousand Brazilian municipal of-ficials. We find that even when strong evidence of corruption is found, audits do not have observable implications for bureaucratic careers, such as dismissals or depar-tures. To investigate whether audits trigger unobservable reductions in corruption or have long-term disciplining effects, we propose a model of corruption with career concerns that we estimate structurally. We rule out that audits have unobservable reductions in corruption, and our results are consistent with either large disciplin-ing effects, or limited effectiveness. We identify strong complementarities among the program’s components, suggesting that multi-pronged approaches combining increases in the frequency of audits with tougher sanctions are most effective at reducing corruption.

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