An offer you can’t refuse: murdering journalists as an enforcement mechanism of corrupt deals

Christian Bjørnskov and Andreas Freytag ()

Public Choice, 2016, vol. 167, issue 3, No 3, 243 pages

Abstract: Abstract Anecdotal evidence suggests that journalists and bureaucrats in some countries are killed when they try to blow the whistle on corruption. We demonstrate in a simple game-theoretical model how murders can serve as an enforcer of corrupt deals under certain regime assumptions. Testing the main implications in an unbalanced panel of 179 countries observed through four periods, we find that corruption is strongly related to the incidence of murders of journalists in countries with almost full press freedom. While our results provide evidence that journalists are killed for corrupt reasons, they also suggest that some countries may have to go through quite violent periods when seeking to secure full freedom of the press.

Keywords: Corruption; Rent-seeking; Murder (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11127-016-0338-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: An Offer You Can't Refuse: Murdering Journalists as an Enforcement Mechanism of Corrupt Deals (2011)
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:kap:pubcho:v:167:y:2016:i:3:d:10.1007_s11127-016-0338-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11127/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11127-016-0338-3

Access Statistics for this article

Public Choice is currently edited by WIlliam F. Shughart II

More articles in Public Choice from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().