Comments by Anna Tompsett on paper "Convicting corrupt officials: Evidence from randomly assigned cases" presented by Sebastian Axbard at the SITE Corruption Conference, 31 August 2015. Find more at: https://www.hhs.se/site

1. Convicting corrupt officials
Evidence from randomly assigned cases
Sebastian Axbard
Discussant: Anna Tompsett, Stockholm University
September 1, 2015
Anna Tompsett Discussion: Convicting corrupt officials

2. Corruption, politics and economic activity
Protests against Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak
Picture credit: Saw Siow Feng, Malay Mail Online
Anna Tompsett Discussion: Convicting corrupt officials

3. Helping us interpret the monitoring literature?
When is monitoring effective in reducing corruption?
• Road projects
• government audits yes, community monitoring no (Olken
2007)
• Health care providers
• community monitoring yes (Björkman and Svensson 2009)
• top-down monitoring yes (Tella and Schargrodsky 2003)
• Politicians
• public audits yes (Ferraz and Finan 2008)
• Teachers
• digital cameras yes (Duflo, Hanna, and Ryan 2012)
• community monitoring no (Banerjee, Banerji, Duflo,
Glennerster, and Khemani 2010)
Anna Tompsett Discussion: Convicting corrupt officials

4. Alternative mechanisms
Random assignment to judge literature focuses largely on outcomes
for individuals. Here, so far: on municipalities.
• So far: replacement effects and information effects
• i.e. my prior that you are corrupt; my prior that I will be
punished for corruption
• What effect does corruption have on both real and reported
rates of income?
• “efficient” vs “inefficient” corruption?
• overpayments à la Tella and Schargrodsky (2003)
• projects halted after corruption discovery e.g. 1MDB
• over or underreporting of payments
• Bottom line: disaggregated results? Qualitative descriptions?
Anna Tompsett Discussion: Convicting corrupt officials

5. Empirics
• Conviction rate very low (range 10-20%): how do we think
about decisions to prosecute? LATE?
• No relation in OLS: richer municipalities more successful at
gaining conviction, or less likely to prosecute political cases?
• Exploit time variation in panel data e.g. instrument for
CONcdt|PROScdt with PROScdt × zcdt|PROScdt
• If we believe this reduces corruption: can we treat conviction
of a corrupt official as proxy for reduced corruption overall?
• Potential issues with instrument (Mueller-Smith 2015)
• omitted treatment bias: is exoneration the only alternative to
conviction?
• failure of monotonicity from heterogeneity of judge behaviour
as a function of defendant/offense characteristics
Anna Tompsett Discussion: Convicting corrupt officials