Amir N. Licht

Culture Rules: The Foundations of the Rule of Law and Other Norms of Governance

This study presents evidence about relations between national culture and social institutions. We operationalize culture with data on cultural dimensions for over 50 nations adopted from cross-cultural psychology and generate testable hypotheses about three basic social norms of governance: the rule of law, corruption, and accountability. These norms correlate systematically and strongly with national scores on cultural dimensions and also differ across cultural regions of the world. Regressions indicate that quantitative measures of national culture are alone remarkably predictive of governance, that economic inequality and British heritage add to predictive power, but that economic development and other factors add little. The results suggest a framework for understanding the relations between fundamental institutions of social order as well as policy implications for reform programs in transition economies.

The Mother of All Path Dependencies: Toward a Cross-Cultural Theory of Corporate Governance Systems

The goal of this article is threefold. First, it points out the growing awareness among practitioners and theorists of the relevancy of national culture to corporate governance and securities regulation. It shows that efforts to treat cross-cultural aspects so far have been few and sporadic and thus posits the urgent need for a systematic cross-cultural theory of corporate governance systems. Second, this article introduces the framework of cultural value dimensions (CVD) of cross-cultural psychology and demonstrates its potential usefulness for analyzing problems of the sort discussed here. It highlights the promise held by the CVD framework for producing testable hypotheses with regard to cultural features of corporate governance systems, in a fashion similar to standard analyses of corporate finance. Third, this article sketches out an outline for a cross-cultural theory of corporate governance systems based on the CVD framework by implementing it to fundamental issues like shareholding structures and the regulation of self-dealing, insider trading, and disclosure. It concludes that national cultures can be seen, metaphorically, as the mother of path dependence dynamics in the sense that they play a role in both the origin and in future development of corporate governance systems. The mode of analysis proposed in this article could be extended to other legal fields and also looks very promising for the study of law and social norms.

Egalitarianism, Cultural Distance, and Foreign Direct Investment: A New Approach

This study addresses an apparent impasse in the research on organizations’ responses to cultural distance. We posit that cross-country differences in egalitarianism—a cultural orientation manifested in intolerance for abuses of market and political power and support for protection of less powerful actors—affect multinational firms’ choices of destinations for foreign direct investment FDI. Using historically motivated instrumental variables, we observe that egalitarianism distance has a negative causal impact on FDI flows. This effect is robust to a broad set of competing accounts, including the effects of other cultural dimensions, various features of the prevailing legal and regulatory regimes, other features of the institutional environment, economic development, and time-invariant unobserved characteristics of origin and host countries. We further show that egalitarianism correlates in a conceptually compatible way with an array of organizational practices pertinent to firms’ interactions with nonfinancial stakeholders, such that national differences in these egalitarianism-related features may affect firms’ international expansion decisions.

Egalitarianism, Cultural Distance, and FDI: A New Approach

This study addresses an apparent impasse in the research on organizations’ responses to cultural distance. We posit that cross-country differences in egalitarianism — a cultural orientation manifested in intolerance for abuses of market and political power and support for protection of less powerful actors — affect multinational firms’ choices of destinations for foreign direct investment (FDI). Using historically motivated instrumental variables, we observe that egalitarianism distance has a negative causal impact on FDI flows. This effect is robust to a broad set of competing accounts, including the effects of other cultural dimensions, various features of the prevailing legal and regulatory regimes, other features of the institutional environment, economic development, and time-invariant unobserved characteristics of origin and host countries. We further show that egalitarianism correlates in a conceptually compatible way with an array of organizational practices pertinent to firms’ interactions with non-financial stakeholders, such that national differences in these egalitarianism-related features may affect firms’ international expansion decisions.

What Makes the Bonding Stick? A Natural Experiment Involving the U.S. Supreme Court and Cross-Listed Firms

On March 29, 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court signaled its intention to geographically limit the reach of the U.S. securities antifraud regime and thus differentially exclude U.S.-listed foreign firms from the ambit of formal U.S. antifraud enforcement. We use this legal surprise as a natural experiment to test the legal bonding hypothesis. This event nonetheless was met with positive or indifferent market reactions based on matched samples, Brown-Warner, and portfolio analyses. These results challenge the value of at least the U.S. civil liability regime, as currently designed, as a legal bonding mechanism in such firms.

Accountability and Corporate Governance

This paper explores the relations between accountability and corporate governance. Although it is a pivotal concept in many fields, accountability remains an elusive concept - close to but different from responsibility. Accountability is best understood as a norm of governance, stipulating particular modes of wielding power and of responses to power in the Hohfeldian sense of this term. Societies that endorse accountability norms in the public or private sphere expect power holders to provide full disclosure and be liable for misdeeds. Accountability is not a universal norm, however. Differences exist between Western and non-Western countries in cultural value preferences compatible with democratic accountability. Within the West, differences in corporate governance paradigms - specifically, the prevalence of shareholder- versus stakeholder-interest norms - are consistent with prevailing value preferences, in line with political theories of corporate governance.

What Makes the Bonding Stick? A Natural Experiment Testing the Legal Bonding Hypothesis

We use a US Supreme Court case, Morrison v. National Australia Bank (2010), as a natural experiment to test the legal bonding hypothesis. By decreasing the potential liability of US-listed foreign firms, particularly due to class action lawsuits, Morrison arguably eroded their legal bonding to compliance with disclosure duties. Nevertheless, we find evidence of an increase or insignificant change in share values. Tests of longer-run effects of the legal event indicate that foreign firms’ disclosure quality and likelihood of facing enforcement actions remained stable, as did investors’ revealed preferences for trading on US markets. These results go against the legal bonding hypothesis but are consistent with reputational bonding and with market-based accounts of US cross-listing. Our results may contribute to ongoing debate about civil enforcement of securities laws through class actions.