Corruption is usually something investigators have to uncover rather than see. It can hide in secret payments, inflated contracts, political favours and unexplained wealth. Measuring it across countries is therefore notoriously difficult, often requiring surveys, expert assessments and institutional indicators.
Pavlo Blavatskyy, an economist at Montpellier Business School in France, approached the problem from a decidedly unusual direction: could the physical appearance of a country's political elite contain a statistical clue about corruption?
