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

Jeffrey Milyo and Adriana Cordis

No 1322, Working Papers from Department of Economics, University of Missouri

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.

Keywords: corruption; disaster assistance; FEMA (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D7 H5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pgs.
Date: 2013-12-23
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/10EVBC0IMVM-rcvnF2 ... g7A/view?usp=sharing (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:umc:wpaper:1322

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Department of Economics, University of Missouri Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chao Gu ().