Discussion paper

DP16060 Corruption and Firm Growth: Evidence from around the World

We empirically investigate the relationship between corruption and growth using a firm-level data set that is unique in scale, covering almost 88,000 firms across 141 economies in 2006-2020, with wide-ranging corruption experiences. The scale and detail of our data allow us to explore the corruption-growth relationship at a very local level, within industries in a relatively narrow geography. We report three empirical regularities. First, firms that make zero informal payments tend to grow slower than bribers. Second, this result is driven by non-bribers in high-corruption countries. Third, among bribers growth is decreasing in the amount of informal payments --- in both high- and low-corruption
countries. We suggest that this set of results may be reconciled with a simple model in which endogenously determined higher bribe rates lead to lower growth, while non-bribers are often excluded entirely from growth opportunities in high-corruption settings.

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Citation

Fisman, R, S Guriev, C Ioramashvili and A Plekhanov (2021), ‘DP16060 Corruption and Firm Growth: Evidence from around the World‘, CEPR Discussion Paper No. 16060. CEPR Press, Paris & London. https://cepr.org/publications/dp16060