This current study aims to investigate the impact of anti-corruption on bank performance in Vietnam, an emerging socialist country with a high level of perceived corruption. An increasing number of financial frauds and corruption have been made public in Vietnam as a result of a vigorous anti-corruption drive in the country. Using a news-based approach to measure anti-corruption in Vietnam, the results of our empirical analysis suggest that anti-corruption has a positive impact on the profitability of Vietnamese commercial banks, however, it manifests in the long term. We do not find an immediate impact of anti-corruption on overall bank performance, but we find that bank profit per branch increases under intensified anti-corruption in the country, suggesting that optimizing branch structure is important to Vietnamese bank under uncertainty.
Copyright: © 2023 Thang Xuan Nguyen. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.