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

States and non-state organizations often only partially comply with international legal regimes. This behavior can have severe counterproductive effects when differences in compliance levels encourage “leakage,” defined as actions that contradict the desired impact of the regime. In this paper, we explore this problem in the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention, the international regime devoted to anticorruption, where states are committed to the criminalization of bribes to foreign officials during international business. We empirically assess a prominent theory that leakage under the ABC was caused by the increase in bribe paying by firms headquartered in non-compliant countries, as they took advantage of the increased constraints facing their competitors headquartered in compliant countries. To test this theory globally, we construct a dataset of observed cases of cross-border bribes and apply difference-in-differences estimators. We provide the first global evidence of compliance and leakage following the intensified enforcement of the anti-corruption international regime.