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This paper analyzes a simple model that captures the relationship between institutional quality, the shadow economy and corruption. It shows that an improvement in institutional quality reduces the shadow economy and affects the corruption market. The exact relationship between corruption and institutional quality is, however, ambiguous and depends on the relative effectiveness of the institutional quality in the shadow and corruption markets. The predictions of the model are empirically testedby means of Structural Equation Modelling that treats the shadow economy and the corruption market as latent variables-using data from OECD countries. The results show that an improvement in institutional quality reduces the shadow economy directly and corruption both directly and indirectly (through its effect on the shadow market).

The causes and consequences of corruption have attracted much attention in recent years by both academics and policy makers. Central in the discussion on the impact of corruption are perception-based indices. Recent research has shown that perceived corruption might not be a good indicator of actual corruption in a country. In this paper, we employ a structural equation model-that treats corruption as a latent variable that is directly related to its underlying causes and effects-to derive an index of corruption. The index of corruption is derived for approximately 100 countries over the period 1976-97.

This paper analyzes a simple model that captures the relationship between institutional quality, the shadow economy and corruption. It shows that an improvement in institutional quality reduces the shadow economy and affects the corruption market. The exact relationship between corruption and institutional quality is, however, ambiguous and depends on the relative effectiveness of the institutional quality in the shadow and corruption markets. The predictions of the model are empirically testedby means of Structural Equation Modelling that treats the shadow economy and the corruption market as latent variables-using data from OECD countries. The results show that an improvement in institutional quality reduces the shadow economy directly and corruption both directly and indirectly (through its effect on the shadow market).

"Both in the developed and developing world, decentralization of fiscal policy is frequently argued to foster investment, because allowing investors to choose between competing locations should make it difficult for each jurisdiction to tax the investment's returns. We point out that this 'horizontal' dimension of decentralization cannot eliminate ex post incentives to tax investments once they are irreversibly located in a jurisdiction, and that the negative ex ante investment effects of such 'hold up' problems are actually stronger when decentralization inevitably leads to multiple levels of taxation power in each location. Empirically, we detect significant negative effects on FDI of the 'vertical' dimension of decentralization, measured by the number of government layers, in a data set containing many countries and many suitable control variables. Indicators of overall fiscal decentralization do not appear to affect the investment climate negatively per se, but our theoretical arguments and empirical results suggest that policymakers should consider very carefully the form and degree of government decentralization if they aim at improving the investment climate." Copyright (c) CEPR, CES, MSH, 2007.