Understanding the Sources of Corporate Corruption at the Intersection of Public-Private Spheres

Abstract

Despite the surge of corporate corruption scandals in recent years, corruption research tends to focus on public-sector corruption through the lens of political economy using widely used corruption perception data. The panel symposium on Understanding the Sources of Corporate Corruption at the Intersection of Public-Private Spheres will discuss new theory from multiple disciplinary perspectives and new findings from unique data corporate misbehavior and experiments for managerial and policy implications. By coming together across the disciplinary divide, expert panelists will offer their insights on how to build on a set of disparate theories about what causes some private actors including firms to engage in corruption. Panelists will also discuss cutting-edge empirical approaches to achieving causal identification in corruption research and new experimental settings that detect corruption. Discussion on why private actors engage in corruption in the national and global contexts will help explain why corporate corruption matters and what can be done to reduce its negative effects. To summarize, the proposed panel symposium intends to engage a group of expert panelists in corporate corruption in a formal, moderated, interactive discussion of (1) the causes of corporate corruption/corporate misconducts in the national and global contexts; (2) theoretically new and empirically rigorous ways to study corporate corruption; and (3) the managerial and policy implications of the findings from recent studies of corporate corruption at the intersection of public-private spheres based on newly available data and experiments.