2018

Research Program on Corruption and Prevention Policies

Corruption is considered by Latin Americans one of the most pressing problems their countries currently face. For this reason, CAF launched a call for research proposals on Corruption and Prevention Policies in order to study the consequences of corruption on resource allocation, growth, inequality and state capacity, among other variables, as well as to assess the effectiveness of anticorruption practices and policies. In this opportunity, the jury decided to award three proposals out of 227 received from several countries.

The selection committee included CAF’s researchers (Pablo Brassiolo, Gustavo Fajardo and Juan Vargas), Rafael Di Tella (Harvard Business School), Claudio Ferraz (PUC-Rio), Mónica Martínez-Bravo (CEMFI), and Federico Weinschelbaum (Universidad Torcuato Di Tella).

The winning proposals were:

• Government Transparency and Political Clientelism: Evidence from Randomized Anti-Corruption Audits in Brazil" by Gustavo Bobonis (University of Toronto), Paul Gertler (University of California-Berkeley), Marco Gonzalez-Navarro (University of California-Berkeley) and Simeon Nichter (University of California-San Diego).
• Aggregate Effects of Corruption: Evidence from Ecuadorian firm-level data by Felipe Brugués (Brown University), Javier Brugués (University College London) and Samuele Giambra (Brown University).
• Community Policing and Public Trust: evidence from Colombia by Eric Arias (Princeton University), Rebecca Hanson (University of Florida) and Dorothy Kronick (University of Pennsylvania).

Each winning proposal will receive USD 15 thousand for its development.