A contribution to the empirics of press freedom and corruption

FREILLE, SEBASTIÁN; HAQUE, MOHAMMAD EMRANUL; KNELLER, RICHARD

Turku, FINLAND

Congreso; The Annual Meeting of the European Public Choice Society; 2006

We test the relationship between aggregate press freedom and corruption performing a modified extreme bounds analysis for a 10-year panel. We also test the relation among different forms of restrictions to press freedom and corruption using the previously unexplored disaggregated data. Our results support the theoretical view that restrictions in press freedom lead to higher corruption levels. Furthermore, we obtain that both political and economic influences on the media are strongly and robustly related to corruption, while detrimental laws and regulations influencing the media are not strongly associated to higher corruption. In all cases, there is indicative, albeit not conclusive, evidence that the direction of causation runs from a freer press to lower corruption.