Isolated Capital Cities, Accountability and Corruption: Evidence from US States

• Main Authors: CAMPANTE, Filipe R., DO, Quoc-Anh
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2012
• Subjects: Corruption; Accountability; Population Concentration; Capital Cities; US State Politics; Media; Turnout; Campaign Contributions; Public Good Provision.; Political Economy; Public Economics
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soe_research/1387; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soe_research/article/2386/viewcontent/21_2012_IsolatedCapitalCitiesAccountabilityandCorruptionEvidencefromUSStates.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

We show that isolated capital cities are robustly associated with greater levels of corruption across US states. In particular, this is the case when we use the variation induced by the exogenous location of a state’s centroid to instrument for the concentration of population around the capital city...