Are majority-female-owned firms more susceptible to bribery solicitations?

The answer is No. Our evidence derives from leveraging international firm-level data to examine the statistical importance of gender composition of ownership as a determinant of bribery solicitations. Our data are for 18,240 firms in 18 industries across 110 countries. For this group of firms, we find that female involvement in ownership is unimportant for explaining which firms are more susceptible to bribery solicitations. However, we find that majority-female-owned firms differ significantly from majority-male-owned firms in terms of their experiences of bribery transactions. Specifically, we establish that firms with majority female ownership are less susceptible to bribery solicitations, when compared to their counterparts with minority female ownership. Additionally, we find that all fifteen sources of business obstacles that we consider are positively related to bribery solicitations. Using an interaction model, we observe that the benefits accruing to majority-female-owned firms in terms of reduced bribery solicitations are diminished in the presence of some perceived business obstacles, namely: corruption, political instability, tax administration, and transportation. Our results, which are robust to several specification checks, including endogeneity tests, add to the gender and corruption literature.