culture and strongfinancestrong a survey of the literature and a.pdf

Culture and Finance: a survey of the literature and a synthesis. Charles-Henri Reuter ‡ Abstract Over the past years an interest in Culture has increased among financial scholars. We provide a survey using financial research-articles with an explicit focus on Culture and relying on a systematic screening of 21 academic journals in Finance and beyond. While we can identify three financial topics at large, we note an overwhelming diversity of approaches in the way culture is conceptualized and operationalized, when the issue is not simply shunned. Therefore we complete the review by a synthesis and we point to a number of directions in which culture-research in Finance could be extended, including richer conceptualizations of culture, further consideration of existing wisdom from adjacent disciplines, greater reliance on qualitative evidence and further investigation on the consequences of embededdness in Finance. Our main contributions are threefold. We underline the epistemological trade-offs and the importance of disciplinary inbreeding in the way culture is operationalized in financial research today. We suggest that the current methodological toolkit, embedded in the neoclassical paradigm (Brennan, 1995), is insufficient to deal effectively with culture processes. Last, we attract attention to complementarities and divergences with Behavioral Finance; in particular culture-research presumes varying forms of rationality and the focus on collective norms could provide an interesting line of research for Finance. Overall, it may be no coincidence if a culture interest is rising in finance at a time Zingales (2000) calls for a re-foundation. Key-words: Finance. Corporate Governance. Law and Finance. Institutional Context. Culture. National Cultu