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| BATON ROUGE – Naci Mocan, Ourso Distinguished Chair of Economics and professor in the LSU Department of Economics, has won Economic Inquiry’s 2008 Best Article Award for his paper “What Determines Corruption? International Evidence from Microdata.” The article was published in the October 2008 issue of the journal. Mocan has been invited to present his paper at a special session and to receive the award at Western Economic Association International’s 84th Annual Conference, scheduled to be held June 29-July 3, at the Sheraton Vancouver Wall Centre in Vancouver, British Columbia. The paper uses individual-level data from 49 countries to create a direct measure of corruption, which is a country-level corruption index based on the proportion of individuals in a country who were asked for a bribe in a year. “This is the first direct measure of corruption created in the literature,” Mocan said. Additionally, the paper is an econometric analysis of the determinants of bribery, which was completed using more than 55,000 individuals from 30 countries. “The results show that highly educated and high-income individuals have higher exposure to being asked for a bribe by a government official,” Mocan said. “Males are more frequent targets of bribery, and the same is true for those who are younger than 20 years or older than 60 years. Improvement in the average education of a country is negatively related to the bribery risk. An increase in the unemployment rate increases the risk of bribery, and an increase in the quality of institutions in the country reduces the extent of corruption.” Mocan’s paper can be read in its entirety at www.bus.lsu.edu/mocan/Corruption.EI.pdf. The Department of Economics at LSU’s E. J. Ourso College of Business offers courses that provide undergraduate and graduate students an intellectual challenge and strong analytic training and the tools to address the economic and social problems faced both domestically and internationally. The faculty’s dedication to quality teaching and research is reflected by numerous awards received and peer-reviewed scholarly articles published in high-quality economic journals. The Journal of Labor Research and the Journal of Macroeconomics, two highly regarded academic journals, are edited within the department. For more information, visit http://www.bus.lsu.edu/economics/ or call 225-578-5211. -30- |
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