Does Social Media Affect Corruption?

In the previous post I had shared an article on the link between Facebook and corruption (click here to read the article). Some of my friends, on my Facebook page and in person, suggested that I investigate if there is a causal relationship between social media and corruption.

Here is the simple correlation between Facebook penetration and Transparency International's corruption perception index (CPI), which is one of the most used measures of corruption in the literature. I have used negative of CPI such that a higher value implies higher corruption.

The problem in identifying the causal impact, however, is the huge problem of endogeneity. The penetration of social media websites and even internet is potentially endogenous to the level of corruption in a country. Clearly, if a corrupt government knows that social media and technological progress are going to hurt their discretion and would limit their powers to extract money, they would try to restrict the usage and expansion of these websites. That's the reason, China and Russia do not allow usage of Facebook. There are several other examples where government attempted to monitor the use of internet and social media.

However, after spending a lot of time, we were able to find a way around that -- something that we call "instrument" in econometric language. So, we wrote an article, collected much more extensive data on Facebook, internet, GDP per capita, population, political rights and other variables. And indeed, a much careful analysis showed that countries that have a higher number of Facebook users have lower corruption. Moreover, the effect of the presence of social media (as proxied by Facebook penetration) on corruption is in addition to the effect that internet has on corruption.

If it interests you, here is the link to the article. Any feedback and comments are welcome.

Social Media, Internet and Corruption

Does Facebook affect corruption? Here is an article!

It's been long time since I wrote a blog article. Well... that's how PhD life is! In the meantime, however, we published something that might be of interest to some of you.

This is an article which explores the link between the social networking sites, more specifically, Facebook and corruption. This article was motivated by the political upheavals in middle eastern countries. This was published in the print edition of May 1st in The Hindu Business Line. The online article can be accessed at

Facebook against corruption?

Comments?

Link to Drafts of Recommendation letter for graduate students

Many applicants have difficulty in finding recommendation letter drafts. So here is the link where an applicant may download drafts of the recommendation letters. Of course, these aren't the best drafts, some modifications may be required.

Recommendation letter drafts for PhD applicants


These drafts are best suited to economics PhD applicants. However, this can be used as the reference for other disciplines as well.

Latex: A very useful tool for graduate students

Today I am going to discuss about Latex. This is a surprisingly strong tool for graduate students. A graduate student needs a better editor than Microsoft word to write papers, third year paper and the dissertation. It's very difficult to write cumbersome equations in word which is sometime impossible or at least very painful to write in word. The formatting is also a painful in word. Latex is a very good document writing tool which produces high quality document in PDF format. It can write nice looking equations for you, automatically put equation numbers and so much more!

All you need is to install some latex writing package such as MIKTEX and a text editor such as TEXNIC center. And then you can find some free e-books about latex and learn yourself. It's very easy and doesn't take more than a few hours in order to gain dexterity in writing the codes which will finally produce the nice looking document.

And not only that- you can also produce slides, the power point presentations for paper and seminar presentations. More information about it can be found out wikipedia at this link. Questions are welcome!!!