Paul Lagunes

Paul Lagunes is a Visiting Fellow at the Baker Institute and an Assistant Professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. His research on the political economy of development examines the issue of corruption, especially as it affects subnational governments in the Americas. Two questions motivate Lagunes’s scholarship. First, how does corruption actually work in practice? And second, what tools are available for limiting corruption’s harmful effects? Mainly through the execution of field experiments in diverse settings, such as New York, Mexico, and Peru, Lagunes offers insights on corruption’s regressive impact on society, the factors maintaining a corrupt status quo, and the conditions under which anticorruption monitoring is most effective.