The influence of wages on public officials’ corruptibility: A laboratory investigation

Abstract

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The Role of Framing, Inequity and History in a Corruption Game: Some Experimental Evidence

“…Rauch and Evans (2000) [13] and Treisman (2000) [15] find no correlation while the other two find weak evidence in favour of the hypothesis that raising wages of public officials leads to reduced corruption. Van Veldhuizen (2013) [22] undertakes an experimental study and shows that higher wages lead to significantly lower corruption on the part of officials. However, the result does depend on the frequency of monitoring of the official's action.…”

The Tragedy of Corruption

“…In this framework, the government is the principal and the public official is the agent (Becker and Stigler, 1974;Van Rijckeghem and Weder, 2001). Experimental studies have shown that the agents' willingness to engage in corruption is affected by the level of wages (Abbink, 2005;Armantier and Boly, 2011;van Veldhuizen, 2013), the monitoring capacity (Azfar and Nelson, 2007;Olken, 2007;Barr et al, 2009;Serra, 2012), the risk of penalty (Abbink et al, 2002), staff rotation (Abbink, 2004), asymmetric liability (Abbink et al, 2014), or information (Berninghaus et al, 2013;di Falco et al, 2016). Generally, it has been found that officials with higher wages, subject to rigorous monitoring and severe punishment when corruption is detected are less corrupt (see Abbink and Serra, 2012, for a review).…”

Análisis experimental de la corrupción y de las medidas anticorrupción. ¿Dónde estamos, hacia dónde vamos?

“…Schulze y Frank (2003), en su experimento sin riesgo, observan que el salario no tiene efecto, pero al introducir el riesgo de ser descubierto, sí hay un costo de oportunidad y un salario fijo disminuye los niveles de sobornos. Veldhuizen (2013) confirma este resultado. Aumentar el salario reduce de manera significativa la corrupción, pero sus resultados sugieren que este efecto positivo depende de la existencia de controles.…”