Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

When Words Are Worse Than Bullets: A Study Of Corruption As An Unintended Consequence Of Threats Of Sanctions, Aleksei Balanov

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This research contributes to the debates on the efficacy of economic sanctions as a tool of international diplomacy. It focuses on corruption, one of the potential unintended consequences of sanctions. Using multiple regression on a custom cross-sectional time series dataset of more than a thousand observations, this research finds the correlation between threats of sanctions and level of corruption statistically significant. The model suggests each new round of threats translates into a 1.25% increase in corruption for relatively clean states and a 5% increase for already corrupt states. The resulting policy implications are examined in this thesis.