Measuring Corruption from Household Income and Consumption Micro-Data: An International Perspective

Nicolas Sarullo (), Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Tatyana Deryugina (), James Hodson (), Ilona Sologoub () and Anastassia Fedyk ()
Additional contact information
Nicolas Sarullo: University of California at Berkeley
Tatyana Deryugina: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
James Hodson: AI for Good
Ilona Sologoub: VoxUkraine
Anastassia Fedyk: University of California at Berkeley

No 18195, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Using household survey data on expenditures and incomes, we construct an objective measure of corruption in the public sector for a broad spectrum of countries. Specifically, we focus on the consumption-income gap for public sector workers relative to private sector workers to gauge the extent of hidden income (bribes) in the government. After validating our data and documenting properties of the consumption-income gap, we compare our measure with popular corruption perception indices. We find that i) the relationship between our measure and the alternatives is nonlinear; ii) available indices appear to be only weakly (and sometimes “wrongly”) correlated with the consumption-income gap at high frequencies; iii) the available indices appear to have a low weight on the relative consumption-income gap in the public sector.

Keywords: consumption; public sector; bribery; corruption; wage premium (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D73 H1 J3 J4 O1 P2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma and nep-mac
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp18195.pdf (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:iza:izadps:dp18195

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().