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Perceptions of corruption: An empirical study controlling for survey bias

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journal contribution
posted on 2017-09-18, 10:43 authored by Klaus Friesenbichler, Eva SelenkoEva Selenko, George Clarke
Survey data on corruption are widely used to construct corruption indices, but the underlying data are hardly questioned. How do individual experiences shape perceptions of corruption? Do more work-engaged respondents perceive corruption as a bigger obstacle to business operations than others? What role does answer bias play in corruption surveys? This article brings together several strands of literature to discuss these questions and test them empirically with survey data from Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. We find that individuals who are more work engaged report corruption as a bigger obstacle. So did respondents who were previously exposed to corruption. We control for possible answer bias by implementing a randomized response technique, and find that corruption tends to be under-reported. The effects of work engagement and prior exposure on corruption are more pronounced when the bias indicator is considered, and again become stronger once we control for answer bias affecting past experiences with corruption.

History

School

  • Business and Economics

Department

  • Business

Published in

Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics

Citation

FRIESENBICHLER, K., SELENKO, E. and CLARKE, G., 2018. Perceptions of corruption: An empirical study controlling for survey bias. Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics, 30(1), pp. 55-77.

Publisher

© SAGE Publications (India)

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2017-07-10

Publication date

2017-09-14

Notes

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/0260107917723787

ISSN

0260-1079

Language

  • en