Firms operating in corrupt environments routinely face an ethical dilemma. On the one hand, bribery can be used as an efficient strategy to “get things done”. On the other hand, corruption is unethical, illegal, and a social ill that people detest. A corrupt environment is also...

Motivated by the recent rise of state capitalism, this paper investigates the effects of government ownership on market valuations across a sample of publicly listed corporations from East Asia. We find strong, robust evidence that government-owned firms exhibit higher market valuation than...