Cultural Secrecy and Anti-corruption Disclosure in Large Multinational Companies

This paper analyses the relation between countries' cultural characteristics and anti-corruption disclosure. In particular, it extends prior research and examines whether country-level secrecy also appears to impact differences in this type of disclosure, while controlling for factors previously shown to matter. Using Transparency International ratings of disclosures on anti-corruption efforts by large multinational firms and an ordinal regression analysis, the paper documents that companies from more 'secretive' countries have significantly lower levels of anti-corruption disclosure.