Search

In these pages I present an approach to the study of the phenomenon of public corruption from two perspectives, the anticipation represented by the crime of bribery and the right protected in that norm. This contribution argues that –in the so-called instrumental crimes– it is possible to refer to a group of norms that sanction processes aimed at the commission of criminal offenses, or acts of influence. Thus, it rigorously examines some aspects related to the right protected in the crime of bribery; it also analyzes the instrumental nature of this crime, the disapproved legal-criminal behavior and the imputation of the result; finally, the conclusions are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El artículo discute las implicaciones éticas de la teoría de la desconexión moral con un enfoque en los estudios de ética del comportamiento y las consecuencias de la práctica del soborno en las organizaciones. El artículo también se centra en la carga emocional asociada al comportamiento transgresor de los empleados, los mecanismos de desvinculación moral y el mecanismo de autocontrol del empleado con su organización.

Over the last decades, the fight against corruption has taken a preponderant role in public opinion and in the citizens' relations with state institutions in Latin America. This article assesses whether territorial auditing, namely, the auditing of the public budgets of local state entities, has contributed to making this phenomenon visible and disincentive acts of corruption that affect citizens. Estimating multilevel regression models with data from citizen surveys and administrative information from territorial comptrollers' offices in Colombia showed that citizen perception of corruption is higher when territorial comptrollers' offices are more efficient and effective. In addition, in territories where municipal comptroller's offices are absent and the auditing is carried out by departmental offices, there is a higher probability that officials will request bribes from citizens who use their services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Peru, during the seventeenth century, the dispensing space of graces and grants was the viceregal palace of Lima. This space was attended by all those who wanted a position in the administration or be part of the court circle of the viceroys. To this end, the use of gifts becames a useful tool and scarcely punished for the diffusion of public and private spheres of Crown officials. Thus, during the government of the count of Castellar (1674-1678) numerous and rich gifts were given to his wife, some of which were met with a provision. Thanks to the analysis of the documentation generated by the trial of residence of this viceroy, preserved in the General Archive of the Indies, we can know the particular origin of this trousseau and better understand the network of legal and illegal relations that was woven around it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article develops a challenge to the construct validity of bribery experiments, consisting in the fact that social motivations do not merely supervene on the intrinsic characteristics of individuals, but rather depend on contextual factors, in this case normative, that give content to those motivations. The theoretical deficit presented by the bribery construct is evidenced in an incomplete theorization of such a normative dimension in the operationalization of the bribery construct, which translates into a lack of operations representing the normative dimension at the concrete level of the parameterization and empirical correlates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the effects of paying bribes for public social services on citizens' redistributive preferences? Research about social policies feedback effects has focused on developed countries and has ignored the role of corruption experiences in redistributive preferences in developing nations. Redistribution requires state capacity. Paying bribes to use social services undermines confidence in state capacity to provide redistributive social services with impartiality in the future. Analysis of six waves of Latin American Public Opinion Project (lapop) surveys in 18 Latin American countries shows that individuals who had to pay bribes to access social services are less inclined to support redistribution and the public provision of health services and that these effects are stronger among poor users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of gender differences in the tolerance to bribery has been gaining interest among scholars in recent years. While there have been attempts to understand why women tend to be less tolerant of petty corruption than men, there are no conclusive answers yet. In this work, the effects of six variables were analyzed through a Structural Equations Model (SEM), with the use of data from 60 countries from the sixth edition of the World Values Survey (2010-2014). With a partial degree of adjustment, the model showed that risk aversion is the only statistically significant variable that would explain why women are less tolerant of bribery than men, although this study has its limitations and the results should be analyzed without perpetuating gender stereotypes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corruption is a phenomenon that involves moral components. Despite the general agreement about the involvement of a moral transgression in the characterization of corruption, it has been difficult to find clear evidence of the implication of the participant's morality in their choices in bribery games. To signal the presence of norms, researchers have relied on negative externalities, punishment and frames, but they have yielded mixed or null results. In a bribery game framed in a neutral way Abbink, Irlenbusch and Renner (2002) showed that the participants were sensitive to the possibility of receiving sanctions, but not to produce negative externalities on the other participants in the session. The insensitivity to increasing degrees of externalities was also the result obtained by Barr and Serra (2009) in their neutral version of a single round bribery game. According to these results, games with abstract or neutral frames do not seem to have the aforementioned moral dimension, which questions their validity as instruments to study corruption. This study searched for evidence of a moral component in a bribery game. The experiment relied on two independent groups of participants (N=106) who played the game either framed in neutral terms or with options labeled with relevant semantic content (for example, offer a corrupt deal). In addition, selfish monetary incentives in the bribery game were increased across within-subject conditions, whereas the payoffs for making no transaction or for playing the Trust Game remained fixed. Finally, to assess the moral connotation of decision-making scenarios, participants were asked to complete (post-decision) a Machiavellian scale, which has been previously associated with different aspects of moral decision-making. The experiment managed to identify a robust frame effect for both Players A and B. Results showed that both potential bribers and potential bribees were significantly less prone to choose the corrupt transaction in the loaded frame than in the abstract frame. In addition, the tendency for corruption increased as the selfish monetary incentives involved in the corrupt transaction increased across conditions. Moreover, responses to the game showed individual differences in the level of Machiavellianism, as high Machiavellian scores were directly associated with corrupt offers, though only in the loaded frame. The data also suggests that the present game managed to capture the expression of pro-social preferences (the idea of social preferences is that individuals evaluate an outcome not only on the basis of its consequences for themselves, but also based on consequences to others). This was evident in the fact that, in general, participants avoided the option that generated negative externalities when there was an option without externalities that was equivalent in terms of personal gain. In addition, possible ways of improving the sensitivity of the bribery game to variables expected to be associated with corruptibility were presented. These suggestions could be followed in future studies. The discussion draws attention to potential practical implications of present findings, which suggest that targeting socially undesired actions using labels with morally negative nuances could be an effective mean to discourage people from choosing them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the criteria to determine when a company has failed to meet it is duty to manage the risks of bribery that arise over the course of it is economic activity. Special emphasis has been placed establishment of requirements for identifying such risks with the purpose of being able to adopt measures to counteract them later. The article analyzes comparative experience, both in relation to the technical guidelines that come from compliance studies, as well as the studies of criminology of corporate crime. Those experiences are explored to identify a series of structural and cultural variables that would predict the commission of crimes and, therefore, require their identification by the company. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

this article analyzes the obligation to disclose certain nonfinancial and diversity information in the board of directors. It is focused especially on the persons that are obliged to disclose, the terms to comply with the obligation, the content of the information to be disclosed and certain aspects that may pose doubts, such as the role of the auditors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the pharmaceutical industry's habitual strategies is the payment of incentives to healthcare professionals so that they give preference to the company's products or solely prescribe them. This is a well-known strategy and, according to all the studies that have been made, it accounts for a very high amount of the expenditure set aside by these companies for promotional and marketing activities. Even so, certain aspects of this kind of practice have close parallels with criminal behaviours. This paper aims to specify whether and in which cases this type of practice or similar kinds of conduct might indeed constitute a crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2010 and 2015 the Spanish Penal Code was amended to introduce new and improved provisions on the bribery of public officials. This study aims to give an analysis of section 420, which deals with the less serious bribery offence, where a public official requests or accepts a gift, favour or benefit of any kind to perform an act inherent to his or her function. Taking into account the objective seriousness of the conduct induced or rewarded by the bribe, this paper presents the proposal to divide these basic bribery offences into two main categories which differ in in terms of objective and subjective grounds for criminal punishment: bribery involving discretionary acts and bribery involving regulated acts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic crisis and the vertiginous fall in the application of the law with its opposite, corruption, bribery, the sale of posts in the reign of Philip III and his valid the Duke of Lerma, lead to a series of memorials, "arbitrios" and books which suggested remedies to get out of this situation. In this historical context, Juan Ruiz de Alarcón writes El dueño de las estrellas and La crueldad por el honor, two tragedies which manifest the role of the formulation of new laws. The text analyses the relationship between laws proposed in the plays and the reformist thinkers of the Golden age [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some authors conceive corruption as the misuse or abuse of public power for private benefit. Despite not being fall agreement about the conceptual definition of the term, there is consensus that corruption is a widespread welfare-reducing phenomenon affecting institutions all over the world (Rose-Ackerman, 2006). The study of corruption (causes, consequences, and effective means of deterrence) is difficult because of the usually secret nature of the relationships involved. Despite the progress made in cross-country econometric analysis of corruption, on the level of the determinants of behaviour there is still lack of reliable knowledge about the factors that affect people's corruptibility or the institutional features that affect the incidence of corruption (Abbink, 2006). The new field of experimental studies of corruption has recently emerged in an attempt to complement more traditional studies of corruption. In this paper, we first present a brief review of some of the most significant studies in this nascent area, in especial, we focus on introducing the methodology and main results of bribery experiments. In effect, although corruption is a phenomenon that can come in a variety of forms, the offer and acceptance of bribes has been the main focus of interest of this new experimental area. One of the simples ways in which bribery has been modeled in an experiment has been allowing couples of participants to play a Trust Game that can have negative consequences on the other couples (or on passive third parties, depending on the experiment; Abbink et al., 2002; Barr & Serra, 2009; Cameron et al., 2009). Negative externalities happen when the monetary transfer from the first to the second player (the bribe) is reciprocated by the second player choosing an option that favors the first player but harms others. Researchers have also experimentally implemented the possibility of a monetary punishment when the second player chooses the option with negative externalities (Abbink et al., 2002; Cameron et al., 2009). There are two goals that this new area of research pursues. First, researchers try to find out the micro-determinants of corrupt behavior. Second, researchers try to test the efficacy of different anti-corruption policies. One of the main problems with experimental studies of corruption is their external validity, that is, the extent to which experimental results can be extrapolated to understand and combat corruption in real life. The second goal of this article is to discuss the external validity issue in experimental studies of corruption from particular examples from bribery studies. We mention two relevant aspects to assess the external validity of studies: on one hand, generalization among different populations, in which the idea is to evaluate the extent to which the same results persist when populations differ between experiments; on the other hand, situational generalization, in which the idea is to evaluate if results persist when the situation or the context varies. It has been argued (e.g., Levit & List, 2007) that the artificial features of the experimental setup (such as the use of abstract language, the detailed characterization of the corrupt transaction and the scrutiny of participants' actions by researchers) make the extrapolation inference very problematic. We conclude that, although some results seem promissory (especially, very similar findings between laboratory and field experiments; Armantier & Boly, 2011), it seems recommendable to keep a cautious attitude toward the generalization of laboratory findings because there is not enough data on this field yet. Consequently, we stress that the problem of generalization can be approached empirically, and that it is necessary to have more studies which aim at evaluating the external validity of experiments in an area which pretends to be relevant to applied issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article aims to question and disprove the popular belief that human smuggling services over the Mexico-U.S. border has become an increasingly profitable industry as border control has improved and the process has become more sophisticated. The author claims that while many believe that small smuggling rings have been gradually replaced by larger, more organized criminal groups with connections to drug cartels, which then make a greater profit, the reality may be that the smuggling organizations are being forced to pay higher fees to pass through corridors controlled by the cartels, making the business less profitable and decreasing the number of Mexican citizens seeking to cross the border illegally into the United States.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses the issue's theme of corruption, including topics of bribery, how corruption is reflected in a culture's everyday sayings, and political corruption in Lima, Peru.

I analyse a model of incentive contracts where principals who each possesses the same monitoring technology, contract with agents from a pool of individuals differing in their wealth endowments. Principals and agents are matched to form partnerships, and the matches are subject to a double-sided moral hazard problems. Agents need to borrow from the principals to finance their projects. In equilibrium, payoffs to the principals and agents are determined endogenously. Wealthier agents consume higher payoffs, whereas all principals get the same payoff. I further analyse the effects of changes in the monitoring cost and the risk-free interest rate on the optimal monitoring and stock prices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information regarding the types of corruption within German criminal law. It asks the question how one should address corruption and within which fields is punishment fair. It supports the thesis that corruption is not a singular crime, but an aggressive one that could infringe protected and diverse interests. Just as corruption can go unpunishable as punishable, it is also possible to formulate a generalized form of corruption.

This article discusses the corrupt practices and public distrust of Argentine government officials after the country's democratization in 1983. The author examines the development of the conflict between civil and political society over the powers of the representative government in the country. It is argued that Argentina's transition to democracy has created a society that is more demanding of its political leaders, especially in terms of accountability and transparency. An analysis of the presidential bribes scandal in the Argentine senate in 2000 is provided as an example of the growing disillusionment felt among the Argentine population regarding the nation's political leadership.