The portrait of public corruption in the U.S.: Evidence from FBI press releases

Public corruption remains a persistent challenge to democratic governance, yet empirical research has been constrained by limited access to systematic, case-level data that captures how corruption operates in practice. Existing studies often rely on perception-based indices or highly aggregated measures, which provide limited insight into the underlying heterogeneity of corruption. This dissertation addresses these limitations by providing a comprehensive, micro-level examination of public corruption in the United States.The study constructs a dataset of 1,872 public corruption cases disclosed through Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) press releases between 2014 and 2025. With the assistance of generative AI, detailed information on corruption schemes was collected and analyzed at the case level. The first essay introduces the original Actor-Action-Target (AAT) framework, which explicitly incorporates the often-overlooked target dimension alongside actors and actions to systematically classify corruption cases and uncover heterogeneous patterns. The second essay decomposes corruption scale into monetary gain and group size, and investigates how features of AAT shape the magnitude of corrupt schemes. The third essay examines corruption duration, modeling the time between onset and exposure to assess how long corruption remains concealed under different contexts.Overall, this dissertation advances a systematic and scalable analytical framework for studying public corruption, offering empirically grounded insights into how corruption operates across institutional settings. The findings reveal critical vulnerabilities in law enforcement and judicial contexts, persistent corruption targeting government resources and procurement processes, and structural deficiencies in reporting and accountability mechanisms. Together, these patterns underscore how institutional roles, discretionary authority, and information asymmetries shape both the scale and persistence of corrupt behavior. By moving beyond perception-based measures to detailed case-level analysis, the dissertation contributes to corruption theory and provides actionable implications for targeted prevention, enforcement strategies, and institutional reform aimed at strengthening integrity and public trust in the United State.