O impacto da corrupção no valor das ações das empresas, pela Teoria da Graxa Sobre Rodas e Areia Sobre Rodas

Abstract

Corruption and its consequences is a phenomenon studied by many researchers, with the intent of discovering what effects it provokes in the social, corporate, political spheres and its effects on the economy of a country. During the course of studies on the subject, such as those by Leff (1964) and Myrdal (1968), two theories emerged: the Grease-on-Wheels Theory and the Sand-on-Wheels Theory. The former holds that in weak institutional settings, corruption tends to be a positive thing within society, since it helps to get through the intense bureaucracy and difficulty that companies have to insert and maintain themselves in the market. On the other hand, the Sand on Wheels Theory holds that corruption is harmful under any circumstance, especially in countries where the government is inefficient, making the country's situation even worse. Thus, a sectorial analysis of publicly traded Brazilian companies, belonging to the non-cyclical consumption sector, which have committed some corruption crime, is carried out in order to verify if corruption practices in the analyzed companies had consistent results in relation to the Grease and Sand-on-Wheels theories. The variables used for analysis were risk, return, and stock liquidity. The results were inconclusive, since the majority of the companies in the sample did not present variation in the results of the applied statistical calculations, however analyzing in isolation, the results of the variable return analyzed are consistent with the Grease on Wheels Theory, while the other variables did not present concrete results, not being possible to identify whether the effect of corruption on the value of the shares of the companies analyzed was positive or negative.