Publications

July 2015 (Revised January 2020)
Case

Horst Dassler, Adidas, and the Commercialization of Sport

By: Geoffrey Jones, Michael Norris and Sophi Kim

The case focuses on the career of Horst Dassler, the son of the founder of the German-based sports shoe manufacturer Adidas. The origins of the firm were in the interwar years, and it rose to public prominence after it provided spikes for Jesse Owens, the famous... View Details

March 2015
Case

Statoil: Transparency on Payments to Governments

By: George Serafeim

The Statoil case describes the challenge of increasing transparency, in extractive industries, around host county government payments. The case describes Statoil's reasoning behind voluntarily disclosing host country government payments, and the events that led to this... View Details

Keywords: Corruption; Disclosure; Disclosure Strategy; Regulation; Industry Self-regulation; Corporate Governance; Corporate Accountability; Bribery; Sustainability; Corporate Social Responsibility; Government Legislation; Cost vs Benefits; Corporate Disclosure; Mining; Mining Industry; United States

March 2014
Case

Inequality and Growth in the 'Chinese Dream'

By: Rafael Di Tella, Meg Rithmire and Kaitlyn Szydlowski

Xi Jinping assumed his position as head of China's fifth generation of leaders in 2012. Xi was head of both the People's Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party, which had ruled China since 1949. Xi inherited a country far more unequal than the one that Mao... View Details

Keywords: China; Growth; Inequality; Wealth And Poverty; Social Stability; Perceptions Of Inequality; Chinese Dream; Chinese Political Thought; Corruption; Equality and Inequality; China

2016
Working Paper

Who Pays for White-Collar Crime?

By: Paul Healy and George Serafeim

Using a proprietary dataset of 667 companies around the world that experienced white-collar crime, we investigate what drives punishment of perpetrators of crime. We find a significantly lower propensity to punish crime in our sample, where most crimes are not reported... View Details

Keywords: Crime; Gender Bias; Women; Women Executives; Corruption; Legal Aspects Of Business; Firing; Human Capital; Human Resource Management; Prejudice and Bias; Crime and Corruption; Judgments; Law Enforcement; Human Resources; Corporate Governance; Gender

SSRN

December 2014 (Revised November 2015)
Case

Governing the 'Chinese Dream': Corruption, Inequality and the Rule of Law

By: Rafael Di Tella, Meg Rithmire and Kait Szydlowski

Xi Jinping assumed his position as head of China's fifth generation of leaders in 2012. Xi was head of both the People's Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party, which had ruled China since 1949. Xi inherited a country far more unequal than the one that Mao... View Details

Keywords: China; Growth; Inequality; Wealth And Poverty; Social Stability; Perceptions Of Inequality; Chinese Dream; Chinese Political Thought; Corruption; Equality and Inequality; China

July 1997
Article

National Champions and Corruption: Some Unpleasant Interventionist Arithmetic

By: Alberto Ades and Rafael Di Tella

We present a hold-up model of investment where active industrial policy promotes both corruption and investment. Since corruption deters investment, the effect of industrial policy on investment is lower than when corruption is absent. We find evidence suggesting that... View Details

Keywords: Crime and Corruption

31 May 2022
Cold Call Podcast

Corruption: New Insights for Fighting an Age-Old Business Problem

Keywords: Re: Tarun Khanna & Geoffrey G. Jones

03 Dec 2012
HBS Case

HBS Cases: Against the Grain

Corruption doesn't announce itself with a capital C. It is subtler and thornier than that—as one HBS student found out the hard way during a recent summer internship in Tanzania. In a new case detailing his experience, the student... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Food & Beverage

October 1997
Article

Does Competition Kill Corruption?

By: Christopher Bliss and Rafael Di Tella

Corrupt agents (officials or gangsters) exact money from firms. Corruption affects the number of firms in a free-entry equilibrium. The degree of deep competition in the economy increases with lower overhead costs relative to profits and with a tendency toward similar... View Details

Keywords: Competition; Crime and Corruption

15 Jan 2020
Video

Prithvi Raj Singh Oberoi

P.R.S Oberoi, Chair of the iconic Indian luxury travel company Oberoi Hotel and Resorts, holds business largely responsible for most of the corruption in India, but argues that there is now an increasing... View Details

2014
Working Paper

Crony Capitalism, American Style: What Are We Talking About Here?

By: Malcolm S. Salter

This paper seeks to reduce the ambiguity surrounding our understanding of what crony capitalism is, what it is not, what costs crony capitalism leaves in its wake, and how we might contain it. View Details

Keywords: Democracy; Industrial Governance; Institutional Corruption; Crony Capitalism; Lobbying; Campaign Finance; Costs; Cronyism; Business Ethics; Campaign Finance Reform; Revolving Door; Economic Systems; Ethics; Political Elections; Financing and Loans; United States

SSRN

01 Nov 2019
Video

Jaithirth Rao

Jerry Rao, serial entrepreneur and founder of the India-based real estate company Value and Budget Housing Corporation, says that his company avoids corrupt payments, especially because it plans an IPO in the... View Details

June 2012 (Revised March 2014)
Case

I Paid a Bribe (Dot) Com

By: Karthik Ramanna and Rachna Tahilyani

Anti-corruption web platform "ipaidabribe.com" leverages the transparency and anonymity of the Internet to encourage private citizens in India who have been the victims of corruption to self-report details of bribes paid, including the bribe amount, the name of the... View Details

Keywords: Crime and Corruption; Internet and the Web; Ethics; Service Industry; India

November 1993 (Revised May 1994)
Supplement

Dow Corning Corporation: Business Conduct and Global Values (A), Supplement

By: Lynn S. Paine

Describes the 1988 amendments to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977. View Details

Keywords: Ethics; Law; Crime and Corruption; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues

August 2023
Article

Anti-Corruption, Government Subsidies, and Innovation: Evidence from China

By: Lily Fang, Josh Lerner, Chaopeng Wu and Qi Zhang

We leverage an exogenous shock—the crackdown on corrupt Chinese officials beginning in 2012—and examine how the allocation of research subsidies and innovative outcomes were affected. We argue that the staggered removal of provincial heads on corruption charges during... View Details

Keywords: Government Subsidies; Research and Development; Innovation and Invention; Crime and Corruption; Government and Politics; China

Multinationals frequently operate in locations where laws against corruption are not widely enforced. We examine ratings of self-reported anticorruption efforts for 480 multinationals to better understand what factors underlie their efforts and their performance... View Details

09 Oct 2020
Video

Mahbubur Rahman

Mahbubur Rahman, a prominent business leader in Bangladesh, identifies the persistence of British colonial laws as a cause of the high level of corruption in the country. View Details

03 Dec 2012
News

HBS Cases: Against the Grain

October 2017
Supplement

Turnaround at Norsk Gjenvinning (B)

By: George Serafeim

The case describes the impact of Norsk Gjenvinning's (NG) transformation efforts on reducing corruption and non-compliance within the Norwegian waste management industry. View Details

Keywords: Change Leadership; Governance; Compliance; Waste Management; Environmental Impact; Social Responsibility; Industry Regulation; Regulatory Enforcement; Change Management; Crime and Corruption; Governance Compliance; Wastes and Waste Processing; Norway