The DOI matches its Crossref record; its reference list is not available.
Audit risk and rent extraction: Evidence from a randomized evaluation in Brazil
Open accessAbstract
We report results from a randomized policy experiment designed to test whether increased audit risk deters rent extraction in three areas of local government activity in Brazil: procurement, health service delivery and cash transfer targeting. Our estimates suggest that temporarily increasing annual audit risk by about 20 percentage points reduced the share of audited resources involved in corruption in procurement by about 10 percentage points and the proportion of procurement processes with evidence of corruption by about 15 percentage points. In contrast, we find no evidence that increased audit risk affected the quality of publicly provided preventive and primary health care services - measured through user satisfaction surveys - or compliance with eligibility requirements for the conditional cash transfer program - measured through household inspections. The observed impact heterogeneity across activities is consistent with differences in potential sanctions and in the probability that a sanction is applied, conditional on detection.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
The source backs part of the claim, not all of it — or backs it for a different population, condition or comparison.
In the citing paper
“The authors argued that the different impacts of audit risk in procurement vs. health service delivery is mainly due to the seriousness of the potential punishment/sanctions and the probability that a sanction is applied.”
From Public sector reforms and their impact on the level of corruption: A systematic review (2021) · cites this paper as Zamboni & Litschig, 2018
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredThe source backs part of the claim, not all of it — or backs it for a different population, condition or comparison.
In the citing paper
“In contrast, they found that the increased audit risk did not affect the quality of publicly provided preventive and primary health care services or compliance with eligibility requirements for the conditional cash transfer program.”
From Public sector reforms and their impact on the level of corruption: A systematic review (2021) · cites this paper as Zamboni & Litschig, 2018
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredThe source backs part of the claim, not all of it — or backs it for a different population, condition or comparison.
In the citing paper
“increasing annual audit risk by about 20 percentage points reduced the share of audited resources involved in corruption in procurement by about 10 percentage points and the proportion of procurement processes with evidence of corruption by about 15 percentage points”
From Public sector reforms and their impact on the level of corruption: A systematic review (2021) · cites this paper as Zamboni & Litschig, 2018
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredThe cited source says what the claim attributes to it.
In the citing paper
“Interestingly, Zamboni and Litschig (2018) demonstrate that the impact of audit risk on corruption depends on the seriousness of potential sanctions and the probability that a sanction is applied.”
From Public sector reforms and their impact on the level of corruption: A systematic review (2021) · cites this paper as Zamboni and Litschig (2018)
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
No citation lists for this paper
No citation lists for this paper yet — checked again daily.
References 28 · Cited by 151
Research works printed but not linked: 1
- Avis, 2017, Do government audits reduce Corruption? Estimating the long-term impacts of exposing corrupt politicians, J. Polit. Econ.
Metadata
- Authors
- Zamboni, Y., & Litschig, S.
- Affiliations
- Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (BR)
- Venue
- Journal of Development Economics
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2018-09
- Volume
- 134
- Pages
- 133-149
- ISSN
- 0304-3878 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W1593408240
- Cited by
- 151
- References
- 28
- Citations by year
- 2026: 10 · 2025: 9 · 2024: 15 · 2023: 21 · 2022: 20 · 2021: 22 · 2020: 15 · 2019: 6 · 2018: 8
- FWCI
- 29.01
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- hdl.handle.net
- Licence
- other-oa
- www.elsevier.com/tdm/userlicense/1.0/ (tdm)
- www.elsevier.com/legal/tdmrep-license (tdm)
- Locations
- Journal of Development Economics (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- RECERCAT (Consorci de Serveis Universitaris de Catalunya) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Funders
- Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Corruption and Economic Development
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Taxation and Compliance Studies
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Local Government Finance and Decentralization
- Keywords
- audit risk, rent extraction, corruption, public procurement, health care delivery, conditional cash transfers, targeting, local government, sanctions, user satisfaction, Brazil
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Audit risk and rent extraction: Evidence from a randomized evaluation in Brazil. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2018.03.008
- The paper
- Zamboni, Y., & Litschig, S. (2018). Audit risk and rent extraction: Evidence from a randomized evaluation in Brazil. Journal of Development Economics. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2018.03.008
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
