الفهرس | Only 14 pages are availabe for public view |
Abstract This study aims to test whether national culture has an effect on conservatism and risk-taking in commercial banks? Two main research questions are set: First; in commercial banks, how does national culture affect financial reporting practice especially accounting conservatism? Second; whether differences in culture among countries affect taking risks in commercial banks? Data were collected from the Bankscope database of 141 commercial banks from four countries: Egypt, the United Kingdom, India, and Turkey. National culture as the independent variable was measured using the four dimensions of Hofstede (1980): individualism, uncertainty avoidance, power distance, and masculinity. For dependent variables, the proxy used for measuring accounting conservatism was aggregate earnings and for risk-taking, three proxies were used: the standard deviation of return on assets (ROA), the standard deviation of net interest margin (NIM) and z-score. Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) and Stata Statistical Software were used for data analysis. The statistical method conducted were descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation and multiple linear regressions. The results support prior studies and researcher’s expectations for the first two dimensions, as individualism is found to be negatively related to accounting conservatism and positively related to risk-taking, and uncertainty avoidance is found to be positively related to accounting conservatism and negatively related to risk-taking. For the last two dimensions; both power distance and masculinity are not found to have any significant relationship with conservatism. For risk-taking tests, power distance is found to be negatively related to risk-taking and masculinity is found to be positively related to risk-taking |