About

Edmund Malesky is a Professor of Political Science at Duke University and holds multiple leadership roles including Director of the Duke Center for International Development and Director of Graduate Studies at the Sanford School of Public Policy. He is based at the Sanford School of Public Policy located at 201 Science Drive, Durham, NC. His contact information includes an email address, eddy.malesky@duke.edu, and a phone number, (919) 613-7401. Dr. Malesky's work focuses on issues related to international development and public policy, contributing to the academic community through his leadership and research in these areas.

Research topics

• Economics
• International economics
• Business
• Finance
• Law
• Macroeconomics
• International trade
• Political Science
• Market economy
• Monetary economics
• Biology
• Public economics
• Political economy
• Labour economics

Selected publications

• The Effects of Education on Corruption: Evidence from Vietnam’s University Expansion

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Do better managers bribe less? Cross-national and experimental evidence

  Business and Politics · 2026-03-25

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Work on the relationship between regulation and bribery suggests that bribes are a joint function of the demands of bureaucrats and the supply of business managers willing to pay them. However, due to biases in measurement, empirical work has concentrated on country-level, demand-side drivers, while research on factors that lead businesses to bribe remains theoretically rich but empirically underdeveloped. We contribute to the burgeoning work on the supply of bribery with a formal model that predicts poorly managed firms may strategically initiate bribes because resource constraints and/or poor service quality necessitate shortcuts in regulatory compliance. To test these theories, we present two connected studies. The first demonstrates that the predictions are consistent with cross-national business survey data. The second, a field experiment, randomly assigned firms to management training courses in Vietnam. Using detailed accounting books, we find that firms in the management course paid monthly bribes less than one-fifth the size ($227 less) of the placebo group, and, consistent with our predictions, had higher levels of regulatory compliance.

  PublisherDOI

• Legitimizing the Digital State: How Institutional Intermediaries Facilitate Inclusive and Effective Regulatory Co-Creation in Emerging Economies

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Civic Education and Voting under Authoritarianism: A Field Experiment during the 2021 Vietnamese National Assembly Election

  The Journal of Politics · 2025-11-07

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Unpacking Compliance and "Leakages" in International Regimes: The Case of the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Letter to JCRE Editors Regarding Errors in "Omitted Variables and Wartime Legacies" (Barceló 2024)

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Making Bribery Profitable Again? The Market Effects of Halting Extraterritorial Accountability for Overseas Bribery

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Disaggregated defense spending: Introduction to data

  Journal of Peace Research · 2024-03-07 · 24 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract Theoretical and empirical research on causes and consequences of defense spending is plentiful. Most of this research uses ‘top line’ defense spending data, either as a share of GDP or as a raw monetary figure. Empirical research has been limited, however, by the ‘blunt’ nature of this data, which does not help to explain what countries are spending on. We introduce a dataset that provides information on disaggregated defense spending from 35 NATO and EU members over as many as 51 years. We discuss the main features of this data in the paper, and the replication files will enable other scholars to automate accessing it in the future. In addition to automating the extraction of NATO and European Defence Agency data on overall military expenditures, we make data on equipment, personnel, operating, and infrastructure spending available in a single dataset. We illustrate the utility of the disaggregated defense spending dataset by replicating canonical and newer analyses using both the overall data and its disaggregated components. The findings differ depending on which type of spending is considered. We found that differences in the relationship between national wealth and defense spending depended on the category of spending considered, as did the tendency toward ‘free-riding’. These exercises shed new light on seminal theories on burden-sharing and the political economy of security. Our initial analysis suggests that disaggregating defense spending is likely to improve the analysis of old and emerging research questions of considerable policy importance, and points to several opportunities to do so.

  PublisherDOI

• Synthesizing Theories of Authoritarian Elections: A Game-Free Analysis

  Comparative Political Studies · 2024-11-27

  article

  Authoritarian regimes adopt ostensibly democratic institutions for undemocratic purposes. Existing research emphasizes five different functions of elections under authoritarianism, driven by idiosyncratic assumptions about the type of dictator and the structure of information. In this paper, we connect the different functions through a three-actor “game-free” model where all aspects of the regime are determined endogenously, assuming only that elections can reveal new information. Signaling, information acquisition, power-sharing, cooptation, and peaceful exit all emerge as special cases in our model. The framework also integrates the two goals of authoritarian power-sharing with other elites and authoritarian control of citizens. We illustrate the model with examples of elections and non-elections in Brunei, Singapore, USSR, Romania, Mexico, and Benin.

  PublisherDOI

• Economic risk perceptions and willingness to learn about globalization: A field experiment with migrants and other underprivileged groups in Vietnam

  American Journal of Political Science · 2024-11-14 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Abstract Existing research maintains that socioeconomically disadvantaged individuals are reluctant to seek information that might help mitigate risk. We challenge this convention by proposing that perceptions of risks associated with global economic shocks can incentivize some disadvantaged individuals to acquire knowledge about their distributional effects. Internal migrants, in particular, have strong incentives to respond to such risks by seeking information. We test our hypotheses using a randomized experiment in Vietnam exposing half of the participants to risks associated with a new trade agreement with the European Union. We track willingness to learn by observing whether respondents accessed an online video describing the economic impacts of the agreement. We find that treated migrants were 187% more likely to seek knowledge than the control group, but find null effects for residents from sending and receiving locations. Our findings help uncover the key role migrants can play in supporting globalization and shared prosperity.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jason Douglas Todd

  Duke Kunshan University

  70 shared

• Quoc Anh Le

  National Economics University

  66 shared

• Anh Tran

  Drexel University

  46 shared

• Anh Tran

  31 shared

• Nathan M. Jensen

  29 shared

• Dimitar D. Gueorguiev

  Syracuse University

  18 shared

• Paul Schuler

  University of Arizona

  15 shared

• Jonathan R. Stromseth

  13 shared