Luck or luxury? Possible corruption in the car registration process in the Czech Republic

Peter Bolcha and Jan Rovný

Journal of Public Policy, 2016, vol. 36, issue 4, 603-638

Abstract: Research into the detection of fraud and corruption has brought many new insights in recent decades, partly thanks to a decrease in the costs of data collection and processing. However, access to data often remains an issue, especially when fraud or corruption seems to be present. This article applies a simple detection method focussing on possible manipulations in the car registration process in the Czech Republic, where car registration plates are allegedly assigned in random order. As access to official data was denied, we collected data in the field for a random sample of 5,000 cars, and used this to examine the existence of statistical relationships between the cars’ estimated price at registration and their registration plate numbers. The results show that cars with intuitively appealing registration plates are on average significantly more expensive than other cars. Moreover, this price difference corresponds to the relative scarcity of the given type of registration plate number, which could be a sign of discretionary behaviour in the allocation of such plates.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

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:cup:jnlpup:v:36:y:2016:i:04:p:603-638_00

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Public Policy from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().