Family-owned MNEs and transparency: a focus on corruption risk in host countries

In the current era, with firms’ stakeholders continuously asking for corporate responsible practices and international investors that consider compliance and transparency as key criteria to evaluate a company, multinational enterprises (MNEs) often struggle to manage activities in host countries due to the phenomenon of corruption that, to different degrees, affects all countries and has been recently claimed as one of the biggest challenges of the twenty-first century. Although family firms are especially careful about the harmful effects of misconduct given that the owning family’s reputation is at stake along with that of the firm, the academic debate on how family-owned MNEs deal with transparency is still in its infancy, especially with respect to host countries. To shed light on this overlooked topic, the aim of this chapter is to explore whether and how the presence of an owning family influences the MNE’s transparency in host countries and, more precisely, how family-owned MNEs cope with the specific risk of corruption.