Putting TRAC to Work
  Legal and Scholarly
College of Business and Economics, West Virginia University
March 2016

Political Influence over the Federal Prosecution of Public Corruption: Evidence from Individual Case Files
By Jamie Bologna


Through the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) data warehouse (TRACFED) I obtain individual case level data from administrative records of federal prosecutors’ workloads across each of the 94 judicial districts within the United States from 1993 - 2010. Using this data, I estimate the effect of the state’s political importance on federal cases of “official corruption” across each state. Official corruption, sometimes referred to as public corruption, is defined as the “criminal prosecution of public employees for misconduct in, or misuse of, office, including attempts by private citizens to bribe or otherwise corrupt public employees” (DOJ, 2014; pg. A-59). Official corruption is then broken down further into seven different categories; four categories pertaining to federal corruption and three separate categories for state, local, and other corruption. A majority of corruption cases fall in the federal corruption category. I use this data to expand upon the current literature in several crucial ways.......[Citing TRAC research].


Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, Syracuse University
Copyright 2016
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