Power over Prosecutors Corrupts Politicians: Cross Country Evidence Using a New Indicator

Anne van Aaken (), Lars Feld and Stefan Voigt

No 200801, MAGKS Papers on Economics from Philipps-Universität Marburg, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics, Department of Economics (Volkswirtschaftliche Abteilung)

Abstract: It is hypothesized that prosecution agencies that are dependent on the executive have less incentives to prosecute crimes committed by government members which, in turn, increases their incentives to commit such crimes. Here, this hypothesis is put to an empirical test focusing on a particular kind of crime, namely corruption. In order to test it, it was necessary to create an indicator measuring de jure as well as de facto independence of the prosecution agencies. The regressions show that de facto independence of prosecution agencies robustly reduces corruption of officials.

Keywords: Corruption; Prosecution Agencies; Judicial Independence and Positive Constitutional Economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H11 K40 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2008
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.uni-marburg.de/en/fb02/research-groups ... rs/01-2008_voigt.pdf First version, 2008

Related works:
Working Paper: Power over Prosecutors Corrupts Politicians: Cross Country Evidence Using a New Indicator (2008)
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:mar:magkse:200801

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MAGKS Papers on Economics from Philipps-Universität Marburg, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics, Department of Economics (Volkswirtschaftliche Abteilung) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bernd Hayo ().