Documentos de Trabajo sobre Economía Regional y Urbana - Natural disasters, emergency declaration, and corruption

Documentos de Trabajo sobre Economía Regional y Urbana
Number: 
325
Published: 
Classification JEL: 
H41, H57, H83, H84
Keywords: 
Corruption, governance, natural disasters, discretion

The most recent

Julián Alonso Cárdenas-Cárdenas, Deicy Johana Cristiano-Botia, Eliana Rocío González-Molano, Carlos Alfonso Huertas-Campos
Luis E. Arango, Juan José Ospina-Tejeiro, Fernando Arias-Rodríguez, Oscar Iván Ávila-Montealegre, Jaime Andrés Collazos-Rodríguez, Diana M. Cortázar Gómez, Juan Pablo Cote-Barón, Julio Escobar-Potes, Aarón Levi Garavito-Acosta, Franky Juliano Galeano-Ramírez, Eliana Rocío González-Molano, Maria Camila Gomez Cardona, Anderson Grajales, David Camilo López-Valenzuela, Wilmer Martinez-Rivera, Nicolás Martínez-Cortés, Rocío Clara Alexandra Mora-Quiñones, Sara Naranjo-Saldarriaga, Antonio Orozco, Daniel Parra-Amado, Julián Pérez-Amaya, José Pulido, Karen L. Pulido-Mahecha, Carolina Ramírez-Rodríguez, Sergio Restrepo Ángel, José Vicente Romero-Chamorro, Nicol Valeria Rodríguez-Rodríguez, Norberto Rodríguez-Niño, Diego Hernán Rodríguez-Hernández, Carlos D. Rojas-Martínez, Johana Andrea Sanabria-Domínguez, Diego Vásquez-Escobar
Luis Armando Galvis-Aponte, Adriana Isabel Ortega-Arrieta, Adriana Marcela Rivera-Zárate

Abstract

Corruption is generally understood as taking advantage of public power for private benefit. This paper evaluates the relationship between emergency declarations for natural disasters and corruption. We use information from Colombia between 2012 and 2022 and an instrumental variable approach. We take advantage of the exogeneity of the frequency of natural disasters to city level unobservable characteristics to construct our instrument. Since emergency declarations increase the discretion of local officials towards public spending, it is expected to see a rise in corruption. Our findings show a positive relationship between the frequency of natural disasters and the probability of emergency declaration, followed by an increase in observed corruption. The higher level of discretion of public officials not only increases the number of open cases of corruption and convictions, but also the amount of resources involved. We also find that the frequency of natural disasters is not associated with a higher level of expenditure in preemptive and relief spending, nor is it generating unexpected spending. This suggests that what is behind the higher corruption after an emergency declaration is a misappropriation of the budgeted resources in Colombian cities.