Misunderestimating Corruption

Corruption estimates rely largely on self-reports of affected individuals and officials. Yet, survey respondents are often reticent to tell the truth about sensitive subjects, leading to downward biases in survey-based corruption estimates. This paper develops a method to estimate the prevalence of...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Kraay, Aart, Murrell, Peter
Format: Journal Article
Language:en_US
Published: MIT Press 2016
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10986/23941
id okr-10986-23941
recordtype oai_dc
spelling okr-10986-239412021-05-25T10:54:43Z Misunderestimating Corruption Kraay, Aart Murrell, Peter corruption reticence randomized response technique Corruption estimates rely largely on self-reports of affected individuals and officials. Yet, survey respondents are often reticent to tell the truth about sensitive subjects, leading to downward biases in survey-based corruption estimates. This paper develops a method to estimate the prevalence of reticent behavior and reticence-adjusted rates of corruption using survey responses to sensitive questions. A statistical model captures how respondents answer a combination of conventional and random-response questions, allowing identification of the effect of reticence. GMM and maximum-likelihood estimates are obtained for ten countries. Adjusting for reticence dramatically alters the perceptions of the extent of corruption. 2016-03-11T17:43:14Z 2016-03-11T17:43:14Z 2016 Journal Article Review of Economics and Statistics http://hdl.handle.net/10986/23941 en_US CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/igo World Bank MIT Press Publications & Research :: Journal Article Publications & Research
repository_type Digital Repository
institution_category Foreign Institution
institution Digital Repositories
building World Bank Open Knowledge Repository
collection World Bank
language en_US
topic corruption
reticence
randomized response technique
spellingShingle corruption
reticence
randomized response technique
Kraay, Aart
Murrell, Peter
Misunderestimating Corruption
description Corruption estimates rely largely on self-reports of affected individuals and officials. Yet, survey respondents are often reticent to tell the truth about sensitive subjects, leading to downward biases in survey-based corruption estimates. This paper develops a method to estimate the prevalence of reticent behavior and reticence-adjusted rates of corruption using survey responses to sensitive questions. A statistical model captures how respondents answer a combination of conventional and random-response questions, allowing identification of the effect of reticence. GMM and maximum-likelihood estimates are obtained for ten countries. Adjusting for reticence dramatically alters the perceptions of the extent of corruption.
format Journal Article
author Kraay, Aart
Murrell, Peter
author_facet Kraay, Aart
Murrell, Peter
author_sort Kraay, Aart
title Misunderestimating Corruption
title_short Misunderestimating Corruption
title_full Misunderestimating Corruption
title_fullStr Misunderestimating Corruption
title_full_unstemmed Misunderestimating Corruption
title_sort misunderestimating corruption
publisher MIT Press
publishDate 2016
url http://hdl.handle.net/10986/23941
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