Country corruption and corporate cash holdings: the mediating effect of firm’s anti-bribery policy
研究了国家腐败如何通过企业反贿赂政策的中介作用影响现金持有，发现腐败国家企业反贿赂政策较弱，进而减少现金持有以防范掠夺和限制贿赂。
The literature about the influence of country corruption on corporate cash holdings is not conclusive as there are studies supporting both a positive and negative relationship. To better explain this relationship, our study introduces a corporate-level mediating variable, i.e. the company's willingness to fight bribery as part of its CSR policy. Using a sample of 1,075 listed firms from 21 European Union countries for the period 2008–2019 (7,771 firm-year observations), we find a partial mediating effect of the corporate anti-bribery policy on the relationship between country corruption and corporate cash holdings. On the one hand, according to the shielding argument, country corruption negatively influences corporate cash holdings. And, on the other hand, there is a mediating effect such that firms in corrupt countries adopt less tough anti-bribery policies and, instead, they reduce their cash holdings both to protect themselves from expropriation and to signal their limit on bribe payments.