An Analysis of Firms' Self-Reported Anticorruption Efforts
利用透明国际的企业自我报告反腐败努力评级，研究发现这些评级反映了企业的真实反腐败努力而非空谈，评级较低的企业后续在腐败新闻中被提及更多，且在高腐败地区销售增长更快但利润增长与销售增长负相关。
ABSTRACT We use Transparency International's ratings of self-reported anticorruption efforts to analyze factors underlying the ratings. Our tests examine whether these disclosures reflect firms' real efforts to combat corruption or are cheap talk. We find that the ratings are related to enforcement and monitoring, country and industry corruption risk, and governance variables. Controlling for these effects and other ratings determinants, we find that firms with lower residual ratings have higher subsequent citations in corruption news events. They also report higher future sales growth and show a negative relation between profitability change and sales growth in high corruption geographic segments, but not in low corruption segments. The net effect on valuation from sales growth and changes in profitability is close to zero. The findings are robust to a number of sensitivity tests, including analysis of disclosures for a larger sample over multiple years. We conclude that, on average, firms' disclosures signal real efforts to combat corruption.