#137 Planet Money: When Science And Corruption Meet

We hear and read stories of corruption every day, but finding cold hard data on the subject is so hard that MIT economics professor, Ben Olken, had to go dig up roads in Indonesia to get some. Olken and his team set out to measure the amount of raw materials that went missing when the government gave local villages money for projects like building roads. The study required the researchers to not only dig up roads — but also to build a few of their own.