How Corruption Hits People When They are Down

By J. Hunt. Social Science Research Network, 2007

116 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Using Peruvian data, I show that victims of misfortune, particularly crime victims, are much more likely than non-victims to bribe public officials. Misfortune increases victims' demand for public services, raising bribery indirectly, and also increases victims' propensity to bribe certain officials conditional on using them, possibly because victims are desperate, vulnerable, or demanding services particularly prone to corruption. The effect is strongest for bribery of the police, where the increase in bribery comes principally through increased use of the police. For the judiciary the effect is also strong, and for some misfortunes is composed equally of an increase in use and an increase in bribery conditional on use. The expense and disutility of bribing thus compound the misery brought by misfortune.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cf82c1a5bf794874b6e61ad788b08b36bf8fac71

Citations in the corpus

• Exploiting the Poor: Bureaucratic Corruption and Poverty in Africa (2014, unknown): “1 Hunt (2007), one of the few papers to study this issue, finds that in Peru, victims of adverse events like crime and job losses are more likely to pay bribes than other people.”
• Corruption in Developing Countries (2012, unknown): “Hunt (2007) shows the negative distributional impact of corruption not by arguing that poor people expend a higher proportion of their income on bribes, but by stating that corruption can be an additional cost on the victims of misfortune—particularly crime victims.”