School of Banking and Finance, 596554National Economics University, Hanoi, Vietnam.
308298VNU University of Science, Hanoi, Vietnam.
Eval Rev. 2022 Apr;46(2):103-137. doi: 10.1177/0193841X211072707. Epub 2022 Jan 4.
Corruption affects businesses in various ways. Anti-corruption, on the other hand, can improve the institutions of the country as well as business operations. Vietnam, as a socialist-oriented country with an ongoing high-profile anti-corruption campaign, provides us a unique setting to evaluate the impacts of anti-corruption on corporate performance.
We address two questions: (1) what is the effect of anti-corruption on the performance of private-owned firms in Vietnam? and (2) how does anti-corruption influence the performance of firms with state ownership (FSOs) in Vietnam?
To investigate the impact of anti-corruption on performance of firms with different ownership settings, we use the establishment of the Central Anti-Corruption Steering Committee of Vietnam as a quasi-natural experiment for difference-in-differences analysis. We generate treatment effects of private holding and the state block ownership. To validate the findings, we construct a novel news-based anti-corruption index from Vietnamese online newspapers and use it in a robustness test to evaluate anti-corruption's impacts on firm performance.
We find a positive impact of the anti-corruption campaign on private firms' performance, supporting the social norm perspective of how corruption affects businesses. The empirical results indicate a negative impact of the campaign on FSOs' performance. The findings suggest that anti-corruption benefits private firms via improving the institutional quality of the country while improving the financial transparency of FSOs. Our study provides a method for measuring anti-corruption which is virtually unobservable and absent in the literature. The findings have implications for policymaking in contemporary Vietnam.
腐败以各种方式影响企业。另一方面，反腐败可以改善国家机构和商业运作。越南作为一个社会主义导向的国家，正在进行一场高调的反腐败运动，为我们提供了一个独特的环境来评估反腐败对企业绩效的影响。
我们提出了两个问题：（1）反腐败对越南私营企业的绩效有什么影响？（2）反腐败如何影响越南国有企业（FSOs）的绩效？
为了研究反腐败对不同所有制企业绩效的影响，我们利用越南中央反腐败指导委员会的成立作为准自然实验进行双重差分分析。我们产生了私营控股和国有控股的处理效应。为了验证研究结果，我们从越南在线报纸构建了一个新的基于新闻的反腐败指数，并在稳健性测试中使用它来评估反腐败对企业绩效的影响。
我们发现反腐败运动对私营企业绩效有积极影响，支持了腐败如何影响企业的社会规范观点。实证结果表明，该运动对 FSOs 的绩效有负面影响。研究结果表明，反腐败通过改善国家制度质量为私营企业带来利益，同时提高国有企业的财务透明度。我们的研究提供了一种衡量反腐败的方法，这种方法在文献中是不可观察和不存在的。研究结果对当代越南的政策制定具有启示意义。
