National culture and corporate risk-taking around the world

This paper examines the effect of national culture on corporate risk-taking worldwide. Specifically, we focus on one particular cultural trait – Individualism – a culture dimension linked to risk-taking and overconfidence. Using a sample of 48 countries from 1998 to 2019 (a total of 111,697 firm-year observations), we document a positive relationship between Individualism and corporate risk-taking. This result is robust to potential endogeneity concerns, alternative default horizons, an alternative measure for corporate risk-taking, and alternative measures of Individualism.