The mixed effects of innovation strategies and bribery on firm performance: A Re-investigation via institutional quality

Abstract

While a large body of literature has explored the impacts of bribery on firm performance, particularly in terms of innovation outcomes, a significant gap exists in understanding the effects of innovation strategies on firms’ performance as well as the influence of institutional quality on the interaction between innovation strategies and bribery. This paper empirically addresses this gap by investigating the complex effects of bribing and two distinct innovation strategies—independent innovation and spillover innovation. Using global firm-level evidence from the latest Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey, we employ three semiparametric methods to estimate productivity as proxy of firms’ performance. Our results show that independent innovation exerts sanding influences on productivity, while spillover innovation and bribery grease the wheels of firm performance. Moreover, bribery and spillover innovation mutually amplify each other's positive effects on firm performance. Further examinations indicate that the impacts of innovation strategies and bribing are significantly moderated by institutional quality. Under poor institutional quality with excessive government control or corruption, the positive influence of spillover innovation and bribing tends to be strengthened. Conversely, good institutional quality mitigates the greasing effects of spillover innovation and bribery. Through multiple robustness tests employing alternative methodologies, firm performance metrics, and institutional quality measures, these findings are consistently confirmed.