Corruption and Property Rights in Russia

• In Event: Law and Political Development: Learning about Politics from the Court Records

Abstract

Corruption is often rampant within state bureaucracies and judicial systems, yet we know little about its micro-level consequences on policymaking and the provision of public goods. In this paper, we investigate how corruption undermines the rule of law and property rights protection in one prominent autocracy: Russia. First, we use income and asset disclosures to create unique individual-level measures of corruption for 360 Commercial court judges working in and around Moscow. We then exploit the fact that judges are randomly assigned to court cases using data on nearly 2 million decisions from 2011-2018. Our results show that corrupt judges are more likely to find in favor of wealthier litigants, back private firms in their disputes with government agencies, and exercise haste in passing down decisions. Corruption can exacerbate market consolidation and inequality by shoring up the property rights of only the select connected few.

Authors

• Jordan Luc Gans-Morse, Northwestern University

• David Szakonyi, Higher School of Economics