IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wbk/wbrwps/5415.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Does respondent reticence affect the results of corruption surveys ? evidence from the world bank enterprise survey for Nigeria

Author

Listed:
  • Clausen, Bianca
  • Kraay, Aart
  • Murrell, Peter

Abstract

A potential concern with survey-based data on corruption is that respondents may not be fully candid in their responses to sensitive questions. If reticent respondents are less likely to admit to involvement in corrupt acts, and if the proportion of reticent respondents varies across groups of interest, comparisons of reported corruption across those groups can be misleading. This paper implements a variant on random response techniques that allows for identification of reticent respondents in the World Bank’s Enterprise Survey for Nigeria fielded in 2008 and 2009. The authors find that 13.1 percent of respondents are highly likely to be reticent, and that these reticent respondents admit to sensitive acts at a significantly lower rate than possibly candid respondents when survey questions are worded in a way that implies personal wrongdoing on the part of the respondent.

Suggested Citation

  • Clausen, Bianca & Kraay, Aart & Murrell, Peter, 2010. "Does respondent reticence affect the results of corruption surveys ? evidence from the world bank enterprise survey for Nigeria," Policy Research Working Paper Series 5415, The World Bank.
    • Handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:5415
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2010/09/07/000158349_20100907100700/Rendered/PDF/WPS5415.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Clarke, George, 2011. "Lying about firm performance: Evidence from a survey in Nigeria," MPRA Paper 35382, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    2. Bernard GAUTHIER & Frédéric LESNÉ, 2017. "Measuring corruption in presence of reticent respondents: Theory and Application," Working Papers P207, FERDI.
    3. Friesenbichler, Klaus S. & Selenko, Eva & Clarke, George R.G., 2015. "How much of a nuisance is greasing the palms? A study on job dedication and attitudes towards corruption reports under answer bias control," MPRA Paper 67331, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. Lambsdorff Johann Graf & Schulze Günther G., 2015. "Guest Editorial: Special Issue on Corruption at the Grassroots-level: What Can We Know About Corruption?," Journal of Economics and Statistics (Jahrbuecher fuer Nationaloekonomie und Statistik), De Gruyter, vol. 235(2), pages 100-114, April.
    5. Nona Karalashvili & Aart Kraay & Peter Murrell, 2018. "Doing the Survey Two-Step: The Effects of Reticence on Estimates of Corruption in Two-Stage Survey Questions," International Economic Association Series, in: Kaushik Basu & Tito Cordella (ed.), Institutions, Governance and the Control of Corruption, chapter 11, pages 335-387, Palgrave Macmillan.
    6. Krisztina Kis-Katos & Günther G. Schulze, 2013. "Corruption in Southeast Asia: a survey of recent research," Asian-Pacific Economic Literature, The Crawford School, The Australian National University, vol. 27(1), pages 79-109, May.
    7. George R. G. Clarke, 2021. "How Do Women Managers Avoid Paying Bribes?," Economies, MDPI, vol. 9(1), pages 1-18, February.
    8. Gutmann, Jerg & Padovano, Fabio & Voigt, Stefan, 2020. "Perception vs. experience: Explaining differences in corruption measures using microdata," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 65(C).
    9. Michael Breen & Robert Gillanders & Gemma Mcnulty & Akisato Suzuki, 2017. "Gender and Corruption in Business," Journal of Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 53(9), pages 1486-1501, September.
    10. Philip Akrofi Atitianti & James Chukwubudom Chikelu, 2021. "Corruption and firm growth: evidence from Nigeria," SN Business & Economics, Springer, vol. 1(5), pages 1-18, May.
    11. Bernard GAUTHIER & Frédéric LESNÉ, 2018. "Reported Corruption vs. Experience of Corruption in Public Procurement Contracts," Working Papers P242, FERDI.
    12. Laarni Escresa & Lucio Picci, 2017. "A New Cross-National Measure of Corruption," The World Bank Economic Review, World Bank, vol. 31(1), pages 196-219.
    13. Aart Kraay & Peter Murrell, 2016. "Misunderestimating Corruption," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 98(3), pages 455-466, July.
    14. Clarke, George, 2012. "Manufacturing firms in Africa: Some stylized facts about wages and productivity," MPRA Paper 36122, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    15. Clarke, George, 2012. "Do reticent managers lie during firm surveys?," MPRA Paper 37634, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    16. Klaus Friesenbichler & George Clarke & Michael Wong, 2014. "Price competition and market transparency: evidence from a random response technique," Empirica, Springer;Austrian Institute for Economic Research;Austrian Economic Association, vol. 41(1), pages 5-21, February.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Public Sector Corruption&Anticorruption Measures; E-Business; Social Analysis; Social Accountability; Bankruptcy and Resolution of Financial Distress;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:5415. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Roula I. Yazigi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dvewbus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.