Revealing Corruption: Firm and Worker Level Evidence from Brazil

Emanuele Colonnelli, Spyridon Lagaras, Jacopo Ponticelli, Mounu Prem and Margarita Tsoutsoura

Working papers from Red Investigadores de Economía

Abstract: We study how the disclosure of corrupt practices affects firms. We construct novel firm-level measures of involvement in corrupt practices using randomized audits of public procurement in Brazil. On average, firms exposed by the anti-corruption program grow larger after the audits, despite experiencing a decrease in procurement contracts. Using investment-, loan-, and worker- level data, we show that exposed firms adapt to the loss of government contracts by changing their investment strategy. They increase capital investment and borrow more to finance such investment, while we see no change in their internal organization. We provide qualitative support to our results by conducting new face-to-face surveys with business owners of government-dependent firms.

Keywords: Anti-corruption program; Audits; Corruption; Firms; Brazil (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D73 G (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 62
Date: 2021-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-acc, nep-cta and nep-dev
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://repositorio.redinvestigadores.org/bitstrea ... quence=1&isAllowed=y (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Revealing corruption: Firm and worker level evidence from Brazil (2022)
Working Paper: Revealing Corruption: Firm and Worker Level Evidence from Brazil (2022)
Working Paper: Revealing Corruption: Firm and Worker Level Evidence from Brazil (2021)
Working Paper: Revealing Corruption: Firm and Worker Level Evidence from Brazil (2020)
Working Paper: Revealing Corruption: Firm and Worker Level Evidence from Brazil (2020)
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:rie:riecdt:83

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working papers from Red Investigadores de Economía Cra 7 # 14-78. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CAIE ().