Bribes vs. taxes: Market structure and incentives

Abstract

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Market Structure and Extortion: Evidence from 50,000 Extortion Payments

“…Second, our study is related to the broader literature on the economics of illicit mar-kets. One influential subset focuses on the market for government corruption (e.g., Shleifer and Vishny 1993; Bliss and Di Tella 1997;Ades and Di Tella 1999;Olken and Barron 2009;Amodio et al 2021;Foltz and Li 2021). Shleifer and Vishny (1993) argue theoretically that corrupt officials should be thought of as profit-maximizing agents and point out that competition between government officials can reduce bribery.…”

The response of illegal mining to revealing its existence

“…I contribute to the literature on enforcement and the incentives of local bureaucrats (Balán, Bergeron, Tourek, & Weigel, 2022;Amodio, Choi, De Giorgi, & Rahman, 2021;Khan, Khwaja, & Olken, 2016), and the use of technology to improve monitoring (Callen, Gulzar, Hasanain, Khan, & Rezaee, 2018;Dal B ó, Finan, Li, & Schechter, 2018;Dhaliwal & Hanna, 2017;de Rochambeau, 2020). The answer to the existence of spillover effects speaks directly to the important question of "How much do improvements in enforcement generate displacement in wrongdoing?"…”

Technology, Taxation, and Corruption: Evidence from the Introduction of Electronic Tax Filing

“…Lastly, this paper contributes to the rapidly growing literature on taxation in developing countries. It focuses on interactions between tax officials and taxpayers similar to Khan, Khwaja, and Olken (2016) and Amodio et al (2021), who study the impact of performance pay for tax collectors on tax revenue and bribes. Whereas those interventions focus on the incentives of tax officials, this paper focuses on the level of interactions between officials and taxpayers.…”