TY - JOUR AU - Glaeser, Edward L AU - Goldin, Claudia TI - Corruption and Reform: An Introduction JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 10775 PY - 2004 Y2 - September 2004 DO - 10.3386/w10775 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10775 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10775.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Edward L. Glaeser Department of Economics 315A Littauer Center Harvard University Cambridge, MA 02138 Tel: 617/495-0575 Fax: 617/495-7730 E-Mail: eglaeser@harvard.edu Claudia Goldin Department of Economics 229 Littauer Harvard University Cambridge MA 02138 Tel: 617/613-1200 Fax: 617/613-1245 E-Mail: cgoldin@harvard.edu M1 - published as Edward L. Glaeser, Claudia Goldin. "Corruption and Reform: Introduction," in Edward L. Glaeser and Claudia Goldin, editors, "Corruption and Reform: Lessons from America's Economic History" University of Chicago Press (2006) AB - The United States today, according to most studies, is among the least corrupt nations in the world. But America's past was checkered with political scandal and widespread corruption that would not seem unusual compared with the most corrupt developing nation today. We construct a "corruption and fraud index" using word counts from a large number of newspapers for 1815 to 1975, supplemented with other historical facts. The index reveals that America experienced a substantial decrease in corruption from 1870 to 1920, particularly from the late-1870s to the mid-1880s and again in the 1910s. At its peak in the 1870s the "corruption and fraud index" is about five times its level from the end of the Progressive Era to the 1970s. If the United States was once considerably more corrupt than it is today, then America's history should offer lessons about how to reduce corruption. How did America become a less corrupt polity, economy, and society? We review the findings and insights from a series of essays for a conference volume, Corruption and Reform: Lessons from America's History, for which this paper is the introduction that attempt to understand the remarkable evolution of corruption and reform in U.S. history. ER -