Corruption has fierce impacts on economic and societal development and is subject to a vast range of institutional, jurisdictional, societal, and economic conditions. It is this paper's aim to provide a reassessment and a comprehensive state-of-the-art survey of existing literature on corruption and its causes and effects. A particularly strong focus is put on presenting and discussing insights resulting from empirical research and contrasting recent with older findings.

Norms and nudges are both popular types of interventions. Recent years have seen the rise of 'norm-nudges'-nudges whose mechanism of action relies on social norms, eliciting or changing social expectations. Norm-nudges can be powerful interventions, but they can easily fail to be effective and can even backfire unless they are designed with care. We highlight important considerations when designing norm-nudges and discuss a general model of social behavior based on expectations and conditional preferences. We present the results of several experiments where norm-nudging can backfire, and ways to avoid these negative outcomes.

This paper uses a novel experimental design to study the contagion of pro-and antisocial behavior and the role of social proximity among peers. Across systematic variations thereof, we find that antisocial behavior is generally more contagious than pro-social behavior. Surprisingly, we also find that social proximity amplifies the contagion of antisocial behavior more strongly than the contagion of pro-social behavior, and that antisocial individuals are most susceptible to behavioral contagion of other antisocial peers. These findings paired with the methodological contribution are informative for the design of effective norm-based policy interventions directed at facilitating (reducing) pro-(anti-)social behavior in social and economic environments.

We examine the influence of corruption on migration for 111 countries between 1985 and 2000. Robust evidence indicates that corruption is among the push factors of migration, especially fuelling skilled migration. We argue that corruption tends to diminish the returns to education, which is particularly relevant to the better educated.