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Background Corruption affects businesses in various ways. Anti-corruption, on the other hand, can improve the institutions of the country as well as business operations. Vietnam, as a socialist-oriented country with an ongoing high-profile anti-corruption campaign, provides us a unique setting to evaluate the impacts of anti-corruption on corporate performance. Objectives We address two questions: (1) what is the effect of anti-corruption on the performance of private-owned firms in Vietnam? and (2) how does anti-corruption influence the performance of firms with state ownership (FSOs) in Vietnam? Research design To investigate the impact of anti-corruption on performance of firms with different ownership settings, we use the establishment of the Central Anti-Corruption Steering Committee of Vietnam as a quasi-natural experiment for difference-in-differences analysis. We generate treatment effects of private holding and the state block ownership. To validate the findings, we construct a novel news-based anti-corruption index from Vietnamese online newspapers and use it in a robustness test to evaluate anti-corruption’s impacts on firm performance. Results and Conclusions We find a positive impact of the anti-corruption campaign on private firms’ performance, supporting the social norm perspective of how corruption affects businesses. The empirical results indicate a negative impact of the campaign on FSOs’ performance. The findings suggest that anti-corruption benefits private firms via improving the institutional quality of the country while improving the financial transparency of FSOs. Our study provides a method for measuring anti-corruption which is virtually unobservable and absent in the literature. The findings have implications for policymaking in contemporary Vietnam.