natural disasters and corruption

Another paper out in the most recent Journal of Law and Economics studies the impact of natural disasters on corruption. Sort of. When a natural disaster hits a community in the US, the federal government transfers money to the local areas to help with recovery. The availability of federal funds might increase the return to being a corrupt government official in one of these communities.

Peter Leeson (George Mason) and Russell Sobel (WVU) find a connection between the likelihood of a natural disaster and reported corruption. From their abstract:

Each additional $100 per capita in FEMA relief increases the average state's corruption by nearly 102 percent. Our findings suggest notoriously corrupt regions of the United States, such as the Gulf Coast, are in part notoriously corrupt because natural disasters frequently strike them. They attract more disaster relief, which makes them more corrupt.

Read the article. If that doesn't work, try here.

diplomats, corruption, and NYC parking tickets

United Nations officials had diplomatic immunity from parking tickets until 2002. Ray Fisman (Columbia) and Edward Miguel (Berkeley) look at the number of unpaid parking tickets held by diplomats from various countries. They find that diplomats from countries with high corruption indexes had a significantly higher number of unpaid parking tickets compared with diplomats from less corrupt countries. This suggests that in corrupt countries, breaking the law by public officials is seen as more acceptable behavior. The paper is forthcoming in the Journal of Political Economy.

Download the paper