We continue to explore whether transparency through the Public Disclosure Program accelerates firm compliance, and whether this varies by firm characteristic, using an alternative specification. Table 14 presents the regression results of equation (4). The results show how effective disclosure is conditional on different firm characteristics, by interacting the variable POST with each of the firm characteristics.

The results in column (5) show that the disclosure program continues to have a negative relationship with non‐compliance, where the coefficient estimate of POST is significant and negative. We find that this negative relationship between non‐compliance and the public disclosure program is stronger for larger firms, given by the significant and negative interaction of POST with firm size. The negative relationship is also stronger for firms that had a higher non‐compliance rate during their first evaluation. We find no evidence that firm age interacts with the impact of public disclosure on firm compliance. The interaction between the length of participation in ILO‐IFC Better Work Vietnam and the non‐disclosure period is instead positive, suggesting that firms that participating longer in the program in the non‐disclosure period are slower to improve compliance, conditional on other firm characteristics.

**Table 14: Effect of disclosure by firm characteristic, heterogenous effects**

||(1)|(2)|(3)|(4)|(5)|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|POST|0.011**<br>(0.005)|0.019***<br>(0.005)|‐0.023***<br>(0.005)|0.014***<br>(0.004)|‐0.009*<br>(0.005)|
|Firm size * POST|0.001||||‐0.006**|
||(0.003)||||(0.003)|
|Firm age * POST||0.002|||‐0.004|
|||(0.003)|||(0.003)|
|Length of participation * POST|||0.041***||0.025***|
||||(0.003)||(0.003)|
|Baseline noncompliance * POST||||‐0.017***<br>(0.003)|‐0.015***<br>(0.003)|
|Firm size|‐0.017***||||‐0.010***|
||(0.002)||||(0.002)|
|Firm age||0.007***|||0.004*|
|||(0.002)|||(0.002)|
|Length of participation|||‐0.118***<br>(0.005)||‐0.054***<br>(0.002)|
|Baseline noncompliance||||0.057***|0.056***|
|||||(0.002)|(0.002)|
|Test: x * POST + x + POST=0|0.91|32.12|327.33|139.68||
||0.34|0.00|0.00|0.00||
|Year FE|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|
|Evaluation cycle FE|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|
|Observations|209150|209150|209150|209150|209150|
|R‐squared|0.011|0.011|0.011|0.017|0.016|

Note: Non‐compliance=1. Standard errors in parentheses. * = 10% significance, ** = 5% significance, *** = 1% significance.

Source: Author’s calculations using data from ILO‐IFC Better Work Vietnam.

_Fifth, does transparency shift factory efforts to alternative areas of compliance?_ One concern is whether the Public Disclosure Program incentivizing firms to shift efforts towards the disclosure questions at the expensive of other compliance areas. We test this by estimating equation (3) for the disclosure questions only, presented in Tables 12 and 13. The results do not show evidence that firms are improving more on the disclosure questions than the non‐disclosure questions in the post‐disclosure period. In Table 12 (between firm), the estimated coefficient of POST is nearly identical for disclosure questions and all questions (though not statistically significant in the latter). In Table 13 (within firm), there is some 28