Integrated Corporate Governance and Anti-corruption Disclosure: Evidence from Multinational Enterprises

Abstract

This study examines how corporate governance mechanisms—board oversight, external audit quality and stakeholder engagement—jointly influence the disclosure of anti-corruption information. Drawing on the stakeholder–agency theory, signalling theory and legitimacy theory, it proposes an integrated framework in which the internal, external and societal spheres of governance interact to promote ethical transparency. The analysis is based on an international sample of 157 multinational companies identified through Transparency International’s anti-corruption reporting assessments, combined with anti-corruption disclosure data from annual reports and financial and non-financial information from Refinitiv Datastream ASSET4 for the period 2010–2024. The anti-corruption disclosure index was manually constructed through a content analysis of companies’ annual reports, using 11 items inspired by OECD and UNODC guidelines. Dynamic estimations based on the two-step GMM model and 2SLS-IV regression reveal that board effectiveness, audit quality and stakeholder engagement significantly enhance both the depth and credibility of anti-corruption disclosure. The findings also indicate a persistence effect over time, suggesting that transparent firms sustain their ethical disclosure practices in the long run. Overall, the study concludes that anti-corruption transparency emerges from an integrated and complementary governance system. It provides an important theoretical and empirical contribution to understanding the interplay between governance, ethics and organizational sustainability.