The importance of adequate remuneration in ensuring an honest civil service is widely recognized in the policy debate.1 The issue of optimal government pay or its cost-effectiveness has not yet been settled, however, and a number of recent theoretical papers suggest that ensuring an honest civil service may be prohibitively expensive.2 This paper provides empirical estimates on the magnitude of the effect of civil-service wages on corruption, as a first step toward a cost-benefit analysis of civil-service wage increases.3
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