The Role of Institutions in the Incidence of Crime and Corruption

Ishita Chatterjee and Ranjan Ray

No 13-17, Economics Discussion / Working Papers from The University of Western Australia, Department of Economics

Abstract: There have been very few attempts in the economics literature to empirically study the link between criminal and corrupt behaviour due to lack of data sets on simultaneous information on both types of illegitimate activities. This paper is, to our knowledge, the first in the literature to explore the nexus between crime and corruption, their magnitudes, determinants and their effects on growth rates. The present study uses a large cross country data set containing individual responses to questions on crime and corruption along with information on the respondents’ characteristics. This micro level data is supplemented by country level macro and institutional indicators. A methodological contribution of this study is the estimation of an ordered probit model based on outcomes defined as combinations of crime and bribe victimisation. We find that i) a crime victim is more likely to face bribe demands, ii) males are more likely victims of corruption while females are of serious crime, iii) older individuals and those living in the smaller towns are less exposed to crime and corruption, iv) increasing levels of income and education increase the likelihood of crime and bribe victimisation to be reported and v) a stronger legal system and a happier society reduce both crime and corruption. However, we find no evidence of a strong and uniformly negative impact of either crime or corruption on a country’s growth rate.

Pages: 50 pages
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ecompapers.biz.uwa.edu.au/paper/PDF%20of%2 ... uption%20%283%29.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:uwa:wpaper:13-17

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Discussion / Working Papers from The University of Western Australia, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sam Tang ().