News

As part of our research colloquium, the next CEPA-Talk will take place on 28th May 2025. Prof. Dr. Johann Graf Lambsdorff (Universität Passau) will be a guest at our faculty and will speak on the topic

"Intrinsic Motivation vs. Corruptibility: Experimental Insights into Methods to Improve Bureaucratic Performance".

All interested parties are cordially invited!

When: Wednesday, 28th May 2025, 3 pm s.t.

Where: Campus, building 22, room A-225 (Fakultätszentrum)

This is what it´s all about:

What drives bureaucratic performance: intrinsic motivation or methods for deterring corruption? We address this question using data from a novel laboratory experiment conducted in Germany, England, Colombia, and Indonesia, involving nearly 1,500 participants and over 11,000 pairwise observations. The experimental design mirrors real-world governance settings by integrating ambiguity, discretion, and income disparities between businesspersons and officials. It captures not only bribery but also harassment and favouritism, allowing us to assess their combined impact on performance. We show that intrinsic motivation plays a substantially stronger role in determining performance than corruptibility. Crucially, these two dispositions are not simply opposite ends of a single behavioural trait but operate independently. We compare four anti-corruption approaches: punishing bribe-giving, bribe-taking, abuse of office, and confiscating illicit gains. Among these, only punishing abuse of office substantially improves performance by avoiding favouritism toward unqualified businesspersons and harassment of deserving ones, bringing outcomes close to those of a corruption-free benchmark. Together, our findings suggest that fostering intrinsic motivation and holding officials accountable for abuse of office may be the most effective strategies.

Here you find all upcoming CEPA-Talks.

Our Chair-member Mohamad Alhussein Saoud has presented his latest work about "The 2015/2016 New Year´s Eve Cologne Event and Anti-refugee Crimes" as a poster in a two-days workshop at Freie Universität Berlin.

Here you can find the entire publication, which has been published as a FEMM working paper.

What? Who? When: Find the upcoming events concerning the Faculty colloquium and the Faculty Reasearch Seminar.

On Wednesday, April 16 2025, exam inspections will be offered for the exams "Statistical Methods III", "Macroeconomics", "Introduction to Econometrics II" and "Evidence-Based Policy Analysis" at our chair. Please register until April 13 2025 by email (pia.scholz@ovgu.de) if you want to inspect an exam (indicate in your email which exam you want to inspect). Timeslots will be allocated and communicated via email.

The publication "The 2015/2016 New Year’s Eve Cologne Event and Anti-refugee Crimes in Germany" by Mohamad Saoud has been published as a FEMM-Working Paper!

For their outstanding commitment to teaching in the summer semester 2024, M.Sc. Mohamad Alhussein Saoud and Prof. Dr. Michael Kvasnicka were awarded with the Faculty of Economics' teaching prizes. Faculty Dean Prof. Dr. Abdolkarim Sadrieh presented the certificates to the teachers during the graduation ceremony.

M.Sc. Mohamad Alhussein Saoud (l.) and Prof. Dr. Michael Kvasnicka (2nd from the left).

All teaching Awards of the last terms can be found here.