While bribery can provide companies with major short-term gains—increasing their value by up to nine times, in some cases—there is little evidence to support many other strongly held beliefs surrounding the “return on investment,” according to new academic research.
The study, titled “What determines the return to bribery? Evidence from corruption cases worldwide,” did not find a link between the size of a bribe and the size of the intended benefit, or that bigger companies are forced to give out bigger bags of cash to corrupt officials. Nor did it find that tougher anti-corruption regimes necessarily reduce the size of the benefits firms receive.
