We are thrilled to welcome Ray Fisman (@RFisman), Professor of Economics at Boston University, long-standing corruption expert and author of Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations (https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691144696/economic-gangsters) (with Ed Miguel) and Corruption: What everybody needs to know (https://books.google.de/books/about/Corruption.html?id=XdVKDgAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y) (with Miriam Golden). Matthew and Ray sat down to discuss the classic question whether corruption always hinders development, which types of corruption are particularly harmful, conversations that inspired Ray’s career and Ray’s more recent work on the hidden influence of political connections. You can find all the referenced papers below: Professor Louis T. Wells (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_T._Wells) whose work on Indonesia influenced Ray Samuel Huntington (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_P._Huntington) who coined the idea that corruption may grease the wheels Moncur Olsen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mancur_Olson) who introduced the distinction between some forms of centralized corruption being like a stationary bandit while other less centralized are like roving bandits Andrej Shleifer and Robert Vishny’s famous QJE paper entitled Corruptionhttps://academic.oup.com/qje/article/108/3/599/1881822?login=true Benjamin Olken and Patrick Barron’s work in Aceh introducing the idea of a toll booth theory of corruption https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/599707?casa_token=FXxoxMmoqHYAAAAA%3ARSJD5IXWK31c7PjQO_vIuBlNTyZPOCRhiszsBLnTd_j0Sn8rbN5kPkO-aK4bj_zLiKYaHe0xBLeN Shang-Jin Wei’s work on the varying prices of bribes https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/cbs-directory/detail/sw2446 New York Times Article of mine collapse in China: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/27/world/asia/china-mine-disaster.html Ray & Marianne Bertrand’s work on hidden influence of political connectedness: https://gcgc.global/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/5.-Yegen_Politics_Ownership_compressed.pdf https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20180615