Posted by Eugene Volokh:
Bribes as data on the importance of institutions:
Here's an interesting abstract I just saw (go [1]here to download the
paper):
JOHN MCMILLAN, Stanford University - Graduate School of Business;
CESifo (Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute for Economic
Research)
PABLO ZOIDO, Stanford University - Graduate School of Business
April 2004
CESifo Working Paper Series No. 1173
Which of the democratic checks and balances -- opposition parties,
the judiciary, a free press -- is the most critical? Peru has the
full set of democratic institutions. In the 1990s, the
secret-police chief Vladimiro Montesinos systematically undermined
them all with bribes. We quantify the checks using the bribe
prices. Montesinos paid television-channel owners about 100 times
what he paid judges and politicians. One single television
channel's bribe was four times larger than the total of the
opposition politicians' bribes. By revealed preference, the
strongest check on the government's power was the news media.
I haven't read the paper (and probably won't have the time to), and I
realize that there are obvious objections to this sort of argument --
no need to pass them along. I just thought that it's an interesting
research project, a creative though necessarily imprecise way at
getting at some soft variables, and potentially interesting to some
readers.
References
1. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=520902
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