The use of data to study corruption has come a long way. I was happy to have been around in the late 1990s when the World Bank began working in this area, and I made some early contributions (here, here, here, for example), but after more than 25 years I wondered how much had changed. With support from the World Bank and KDI, my coauthor and I decided to systematically catalogue the sources of data used to study corruption, for what purposes, and in which countries. We focused on a particular year (2022) and a particular discipline (economics). You can find the paper here.

I was also invited to present the results at the 44^th Virtual Roundtable on Measuring Corruption organized under the auspices of the Japan Network of Anti-Corruption Researchers (JANAR). There was some good discussion, helpful feedback on the paper, and some commiserating about the insufficient willingness to invest in new types of data by many economic researchers. You can find the recording here.

Tl;dr, the explosion of corruption research using data is encouraging, but the overreliance on old index measures that are not suited for some tasks, and the relatively few economics papers that cite other disciplines, are somewhat disappointing. Check out the paper and let me know if you agree!