Corruption, Tax Evasion and the Role of Wage Incentives With Endogenous Monitoring Technology

Abstract

The importance of high salaries to circumvent bureaucratic corruption has been widely recognized in the policy debate. Yet, there appears to be much reluctance when it comes to the implementation. In this paper, we argue that deterring corruption through wage incentives may become prohibitively expensive that the government finds it optimal to accept higher net revenues at the expense of honesty. Deviating from the existing literature, we set an endogenous monitoring technology that allows us to capture the dual role of auditing, as a complement with and as a substitute for wage incentives to deter bribery. We find that the government is better-off either completely eliminating corruption or accepting corruption by offering wages lower than the market wage. Offering public wage premium that does not deter bribery is suboptimal. When it is optimal to deter bribery, the government can do it either through wage incentives or monitoring. The role of wage incentives decreases in societies with higher level of dishonesty. (JEL D73, H26, J33, J41)