Squeezing the Balloon: How Anti-Corruption Enforcement Restructures Firm Corruption in China

Abstract

How does anti-corruption enforcement affect firm-related corruption? Scholarly assessment of enforcement effectiveness has produced inconsistent results, with some studies documenting substantial deterrence and others finding weak or perverse effects on aggregate corruption. This paper argues that much of the inconsistency reflects a tendency to treat corruption as a homogeneous category. Firm corruption in fact comprises two structurally distinct forms: firm-state corruption, the bilateral exchange between firms and public officials, and firm-internal corruption, the unilateral appropriation of firm resources by insiders. The two forms respond to enforcement through different mechanisms and may even move in opposing directions. I test this argument using a comprehensive transaction-level dataset of approximately 98,000 Chinese corruption judgments containing over 380,000 individual corrupt events extracted via a large language model. Exploiting the staggered deployment of Central Inspection Teams across provinces and applying four modern difference-in-differences estimators, I find that anti-corruption enforcement reduces the frequency of firm-state corruption while raising the per-transaction price, the joint pattern of a supply-side cost shock under inelastic demand. At the same time, firm-internal corruption rises substantially along both the frequency and amount margins, consistent with an institutional environment shift in which the concentration of enforcement attention on the firm-state channel leaves firm-internal extraction relatively less monitored. The risk attached to discovered corrupt connections rises sharply, converting connections that previously functioned as strategic assets into substantial legal and economic liabilities for the firms holding them. The repricing of discovered corruption falls most heavily on the firm-state connections the campaign targets. These findings suggest that anti-corruption enforcement fundamentally restructures the corruption landscape firms face, reducing the returns to political connections while creating new governance vulnerabilities within firms.

Publication
Job Market Paper