Does the Central Government’s Anti-Corruption Campaign Have an Impact on Corporate Cost Stickiness?

Abstract

This paper starts with the anti-corruption campaign of the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), adopts the empirical method to study whether and how the anti-corruption campaign of the central government influences the cost stickiness of enterprises. And the paper further studies whether the anti-corruption campaign has different impacts on enterprises with different property rights. The results show that the cost stickiness of listed companies decreases significantly after the anti-corruption campaign. Compared with non-state-owned enterprises, the cost stickiness of state-owned enterprises weakened less after the anti-corruption campaign started. The research results of this paper show that anti-corruption can restrain the rent-seeking behavior of enterprises and make them apply more resources to normal production and operation activities.