Fighting Corruption in Education: What Works and Who Benefits?

Oana Borcan (), Mikael Lindahl and Andreea Mitrut
Additional contact information
Oana Borcan: University of East Anglia

No 9561, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We investigate the distributional consequences of a corruption-fighting initiative in Romania targeting the endemic fraud in a high-stakes high school exit exam, which introduced CCTV monitoring of the exam and credible punishment threats for teachers and students. We find that the campaign was effective in reducing corruption and, in particular, that monitoring increased the effectiveness of the punishment threats. Estimating the heterogeneous impact for students of different poverty status we show that curbing corruption led to a worrisome score gap increase between poor and non-poor students. Consequently, the poor students have reduced chances to enter an elite university.

Keywords: bribes; high-stakes exam; corruption; monitoring and punishment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I24 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 62 pages
Date: 2015-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-law, nep-tra and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published - published in: American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 2017, 9 (1), 180-209

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp9561.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Fighting Corruption in Education: What Works and Who Benefits? (2017)
Working Paper: Fighting Corruption in Education: What Works and Who Benefits? (2015)
Working Paper: Fighting Corruption in Education: What Works and Who Benefits? (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp9561

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().