Gender and Corruption in Business

Abstract

Are women less corrupt in business? We revisit this question using firm-level data from the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys, which measure firms' experience of corruption and the gender of their owners and top managers. We find that women in positions of influence are associated with less corruption: female-owned businesses pay less in bribes and corruption is seen as less of an obstacle in companies where women are represented in top management. By providing evidence that women are, ethically at least, good for business our research contributes to the literature on development, gender equality, and corruption more generally.JEL Classification: D73, G32, J16, M14

Corruption and sustainable development: The impact on income shifting in European international groups

“…Other researchers have always adopted a macroeconomic approach, exploring corruption with a specific focus on business contexts. Gillanders and Neselevska (2018) show that experiencing private-to-public bribery reduces trust in large pri- Microeconomic impacts of private-to-public corruption have been discussed less (Badawi & Al Qudah, 2019;Breen et al, 2017;Burnham, Jeon, & Zeng, 2018;Collison, Cobb, Power, & Stevenson, 2008;Putra, Pagalung, & Habbe, 2018;Vu et al, 2018;Wu, 2014). Van Vu et al (2018) shown that the intensity of bribery has a negative impact on firms' financial performance.…”

Corruption and Technological Innovation in Private Small-Medium Scale Companies: Does Female Top Management Play a Role?

“…From these results above, we conclude that there is indeed a connection between corruption and innovation in SMCs, but that it may vary depending on the specific aspect that we focus on. For example, the firm's owner has the power to constrain corrupt behaviors, while the top manager may not have as much of an effect unless he/she is an owner, as he/she may be constrained by opposing groups within the corporate structure [35]. In brief, these results offer supports for Hypothesis 1 and may need to be further verified from a gender perspective.…”

“…In line with these studies, female top managers in SMCs are associated with a lower incidence of bribery and a more positive outlook regarding the influence of corruption on doing business. However, female top managers may pose a detrimental effect on SMCs' innovation, because not paying informal money or gifts to a corrupt politician might be seen as threatening to the dominant regime and provoke retaliation [35]. Consequently, these companies supervised by female top managers cannot obtain the extra benefits and resources from political bureaucrats.…”

“…However, the CES, which started about 15 years ago, is highly typical firm-level survey that is well-designed and implemented according to the propositions in previous literature. Drawing on Breen et al [35], we consider a firm's informal payment as evidence of participation in corruption. By dealing with incomplete or missing data, our dataset contains observations on over 25 central cities, 20 industries, and 1700 sample firms in China, though our sample size depends primarily on our choice of dependent and independent variables.…”

“…For the effect of women as top managers on corruption, we draw lessons from Jha and Sarangi [4] and Breen et al [35] and select some variables such as foreign ownership, exporter situation and sales as the control variables. In Table 7, the correlation between female top management and corruption appears to be robust at the 1% or 5% level of significance and we find that female top management also exerts a negative influence on the firm's corrupt acts from column 2 to column 3.…”