Languages and corporate savings behavior

Shimin Chen (First Author), Henrik Cronqvist (Participant Author), Xu Ni (Participant Author), Frank Zhang (Participant Author)

科研成果: 期刊稿件期刊论文

48 引用 (Web of Science)

摘要

Speakers of strong future time reference (FTR) languages (e.g., English) are required to grammatically distinguish between future and present events, while speakers of weak-FTR languages (e.g., Chinese) are not. We hypothesize that speaking about the future in the present tense may result in the belief that adverse credit events are more imminent. Consistent with such a linguistic hypothesis, weak-FTR language firms are found to have higher precautionary cash holdings. We report additional supportive results from changes in the relative importance of different languages in a country's business domain, evidence from within one country with several distinct languages, and results related to changes following a severe financial crisis. Our evidence introduces a new explanation for heterogeneity in corporate savings behavior, provides insights about belief formation in firms, and adds to research on the effects of languages on economic outcomes.
源语言英语
页(从-至)320-341
期刊Journal of Corporate Finance
46
DOI
出版状态已出版 - 2017

Corresponding author email

nserene@shu.edu.cn

关键词

  • Corporate savings behavior
  • Linguistic hypothesis

成果物的来源

  • ABDC-A*
  • Scopus
  • SSCI

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