Cultural Values and Corporate Risk-Taking

摘要

We investigate the role of natural culture in corporate risk-taking using measures of income variability, R&D spending, and use of long-term debt. We identify three dimensions of national culture that should influence corporate risk-taking, and we isolate the effects of country-level and firm-level variables by using a hierarchical linear modeling approach. The three specific cultural values that we study – harmony, individualism, and uncertainty avoidance-have both direct and indirect effects on our various measures of risk-taking. These results survive when we control for firm-level and country-level characteristics.