David Dollar Memorial Prize 2026 — Winner Announcement
The World Bank's David Dollar Memorial Prize honors the memory and contribution of David Dollar, a distinguished economist whose career spanned UCLA, the World Bank, the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and the Brookings Institution. He was one of the pioneers in the World Bank’s focus on investment climate. Established in his memory, the prize encourages high-quality, policy-relevant research on private sector development.
Winner
The 2026 prize is awarded to Martin Mattsson (Assistant Professor, National University of Singapore; affiliate of J-PAL and CEPR) for his paper:
This paper explains why corrupt government offices make businesses wait longer and deal with more paperwork. The author builds a model where a corrupt official acts like a business charging different prices to different customers. If the official knows how much a firm wants to avoid delays (its "willingness to pay"), they can charge each firm exactly that amount as a bribe and still process things efficiently. But if the official doesn't know this, they deliberately create more red tape to squeeze higher bribes from firms that value speed — making the whole system slower for everyone else.
The author tests this idea using World Bank Enterprise Survey data from nearly 190,000 government-business interactions across 158 countries. The results confirm that corruption causes the most delays when officials have less information about firms, and that smaller or weaker firms suffer the worst — since they can least afford to pay bribes to cut through the red tape. Martin’s paper truly exemplifies the spirit of David Dollar’s legacy with emphasis on policy-relevant insights supported by granular data and rigorous empirical analysis. This paper exemplifies the spirit of David Dollar's legacy: policy-relevant insights grounded in granular data and rigorous empirical analysis.
Award
The prize, which includes a monetary award of 3,000 USD will be presented at the World Bank Enterprise Surveys 20th Anniversary Forum on May 20, 2026. Martin Mattsson will present the paper at the conference on the same day.
Additional Information
The call for papers and selection process are described in detail here.
