Egalitarianism, Cultural Distance, and Foreign Direct Investment: A New Approach
研究发现，国家间平等主义文化取向的差异会对外国直接投资流动产生负面影响，且该效应稳健于其他文化维度、法律制度和经济发展等因素。
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.