Resumen de Corporate governance, risk aversion and firm value

Ron Christian Antonczyk, Astrid Juliane Salzmann

• This study extends the current state of research on corporate governance and firm value determinants by introducing culture as a proxy for risk aversion. We focus on individuals' risk aversion and connect it to Hofstede's cultural dimensions of uncertainty avoidance. In a cross-country empirical analysis with 47 countries, we find that uncertainty avoidance is negatively associated with valuation of firms. Our findings suggest that cross-country variation in risk aversion as well as in corporate governance impacts firm valuation. The results are robust to controlling for other determinants of firm value and using different datasets.