Corruption obstacles and sustainability practices: evidence on the moderating role of female ownership

This study aimed to examine the effect of corruption obstacles on corporate sustainability practices and the moderating role of female ownership in a developing market context. Ordered probit regression with interaction terms was adopted using firm-level data from the 2023 World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) covering 1,537 firms in Indonesia. This was complemented by OLS and two-stage least squares (2SLS) robustness checks to address potential endogeneity. The results showed that corruption obstacles and female ownership exerted significant negative effects on sustainability practices. The interaction was significantly positive, indicating that female ownership partially buffered the erosive effect of corruption. However, the buffering effect was concentrated in regions with more mature institutional infrastructure. Previous investigations treated female ownership as a uniformly positive predictor of sustainability. This study reported a context-dependent dual role, where a baseline disadvantage combined with a resilience advantage under institutional pressure, using firm-level evidence from a developing market. The results suggested that policies leveraging female ownership as a governance mechanism to safeguard sustainability under weak institutional conditions must consider regional heterogeneity in institutional maturity rather than assume uniform effectiveness.