Monitoring Corruption: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia

Benjamin Olken

Journal of Political Economy, 2007, vol. 115, issue 2, 200-249

Abstract: This paper presents a randomized field experiment on reducing corruption in over 600 Indonesian village road projects. I find that increasing government audits from 4 percent of projects to 100 percent reduced missing expenditures, as measured by discrepancies between official project costs and an independent engineers’ estimate of costs, by eight percentage points. By contrast, increasing grassroots participation in monitoring had little average impact, reducing missing expenditures only in situations with limited free-rider problems and limited elite capture. Overall, the results suggest that traditional top-down monitoring can play an important role in reducing corruption, even in a highly corrupt environment.

Date: 2007
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (649)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/517935 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

Related works:
Working Paper: Monitoring corruption: Evidence from a field experiment in indonesia (2005)
Working Paper: Monitoring Corruption: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia (2005)
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:ucp:jpolec:v:115:y:2007:p:200-249

DOI: 10.1086/517935

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Political Economy from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().