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 international regime devoted to anticorruption, centered on the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention (ABC), which led to the criminalization of bribes to foreign officials in international business. We theorize that a prominent form of leakage under the ABC was 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, we construct a dataset of observed cases of cross-border bribes and apply difference-indifferences estimators. We provide the first global evidence of compliance and leakage following the intensified enforcement of the anti-corruption international regime.