Date Thesis Awarded
5-2009
Access Type
Honors Thesis -- Access Restricted On-Campus Only
Degree Name
Bachelors of Arts (BA)
Department
Economics
Advisor
Berhanu Abegaz
Committee Members
Melissa McInerney
Paula M. Pickering
Abstract
Decentralization has the potential to lower corruption and alleviate poverty across the world. The true effects of this process are unclear since there are relatively few studies on decentralization and many of these studies, both theoretical and empirical, give conflicting results. One major problem in the literature for the effects of decentralization on corruption has been sample selection bias. The main cross-country dataset for decentralization, the IMF's Government Finance Statistics (GFS), has data for only about 40 countries, and most of these are developed. I attempt to mitigate this sample-selection problem by first estimating a Heckman model for decentralization in order to predict values for unobserved countries and then using these predicted values to estimate decentralization's impact on corruption. My results show that decentralization has an insignificant effect on corruption, suggesting that decentralization alone may not be a useful tool for mitigating corruption.
Recommended Citation
Eggleston, Jonathan, "Decentralization and Corruption: A Model of Interjurisdictional Competition and Weakened Accountability" (2009). Undergraduate Honors Theses. William & Mary. Paper 254.
https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses/254
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Comments
Thesis is part of Honors ETD pilot project, 2008-2013. Migrated from Dspace in 2016.