نفوذ فرهنگی: بررسی تفاوت های بین کشوری در ساختار سرمایه

Employing firm-level observations from 13 countries over a seven year period, and controlling for an extensive set of firm-level characteristics, industry effects and country-level institutional variables, we provide a conceptual framework and empirical analysis of how culture influences capital structure in small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Uncertainty avoidance and individuality are negatively related with long-term debt, highlighting SME owners desire to avoid heightened business risk, reduce interference from debt providers, and maintain autonomy and independence. Negative relationships between power distance and debt suggest a more consultative role with financial institutions, facilitating greater access to debt. Policy makers should take account of the powerful consequences of cultural influences when designing and implementing financing initiatives.

Over fifty years since the publication of the Modigliani and Miller (1958) irrelevance propositions, many studies have investigated the elusive ‘optimal’ capital structure. This voluminous literature has predominantly focused on public, nonfinancial corporations with access to United States or other international capital markets (Myers, 2001). Notwithstanding the importance of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) to national economies, the subject of SME financing has received relatively less attention. This deficit in the literature has been somewhat ameliorated in recent decades, with early studies emerging primarily from the UK (Chittenden, Hall, & Hutchinson, 1996) and the US (Balakrishnan & Fox, 1993). Subsequent studies have emerged from a growing number of countries, including Portugal (Esperanca, Gama, & Gulamhussen, 2003), Belgium (Heyman et al., 2008 and Manigart and Struyf, 1997), Spain (Garcia-Teruel and Martinez-Solano, 2007 and Sogorb Mira, 2005), Italy (Giudici & Paleari, 2000), Sweden (Berggren et al., 2000, Cressy and Olofsson, 1997a and Cressy and Olofsson, 1997b), Taiwan (Fu, Ke, & Huang, 2002), India (Ghosh, 2007), Germany (Audretsch and Elston, 1997, Elsas and Krahnen, 1998 and Fritsch, 1993), Australia (Cassar and Holmes, 2003 and Fitzsimmons and Douglas, 2006), and Ireland (Mac An Bhaird & Lucey, 2010). Whilst this research has been extended to comparative international studies (Bancel & Mittoo, 2004; Daskalakis and Psillaki, 2008, Hall et al., 2004 and Peterson and Schulman, 1987), there is little or no research on the influence of national culture on capital structure. Investigation of the influence of culture in the SME literature has been confined to studies on enterprise ( Gray, 1998) and as a ‘spur’ for innovation and growth ( Bradley & Kennelly, 2008). Empirical studies of SME financing typically test propositions of capital structure theories developed in the field of corporate finance by investigating firm characteristic determinants of short-term, long-term and total debt ratios. Cross-country comparative studies test similar firm characteristic determinants, although a number of studies examine other factors, such as the effect of creditor rights and legal origin (Hall & Jorgensen, 2005) and the effect of legal determinants on external finance (La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, Shleifer, & Vishny, 1998). Results from these studies suggest a number of similar inter-country factors in financing SMEs; for example, Daskalakis and Psillaki (2008) conclude that firm effects are more important than country effects, attributing similarities in determinants of capital structure to the commonality of institutional characteristics of the two countries studied. On the other hand, Hall et al. (2004: p. 726) find “variations in both capital structure and the determinants of capital structure between the countries surveyed …. [which] could well be due to differences in attitudes to borrowing, disclosure requirements, relationships with banks, taxation and other national economic, social and cultural differences”. Whilst the suggestion of potential cultural influence on SME financing is unusual, culture is a key dimension in many fields of business and finance. In addition to its influence on whole financial systems (e.g. Islamic finance), culture has been shown to impact on commodity and services trade, corporate transparency, foreign direct investment, mergers and acquisitions, the modality of market entry, and managerial control (Bushman et al., 2004, Demirbag et al., 2007, Grinblatt and Keloharju, 2001, Harzing, 2003, Hitt et al., 2006, Kaufmann and O'Neill, 2007, Kirkman et al., 2006 and Kogut and Singh, 1988; Kwok and Tadesse, 2006, Sekely and Collins, 1988, Slangen, 2006 and Tihanyi et al., 2005). Research in the corporate finance capital structure literature also investigates the influence of cultural variables on international capital structure (Chui et al., 2002, Gleason et al., 2000, Kwok and Tadesse, 2006 and Sekely and Collins, 1988). These studies suggest that national culture may be an important “missing piece” to the capital structure puzzle (Chui et al., 2002). In spite of this, however, research on the determinants of capital structure in the SME literature has largely ignored the cultural dimension, even though culture may be a more important element in the SME sector. This is because, whilst the influence of the cultural dimension in the corporate sector may be somewhat diluted because of international aspects of ownership and financial markets, the implications of culture are much more powerful in the SME sector. This is due to the closely held ownership structure of firms in the sector, and because SMEs generally access local sources of financing. In this paper, we seek to add to the literature by investigating the role of culture in explaining the capital structure of SMEs. A number of specific research questions are posed: a. Do capital structures differ across countries? b. To what extent is capital structure determined by firm characteristics, and industry sector? c. What are the inter-country differences in firm characteristic, and sectoral effects? d. Controlling for firm and industry effects, to what extent is capital structure determined by (3) institutional factors, and (4) cultural factors. The remainder of our paper is structured as follows. In Section 2, we describe Hofstede's measures of cultural relativism and formulate hypotheses. In doing so, we focus particularly on the role of culture and other variables that are related to culture. In Section 3, we present our data, describe our methodology and formalise our tests. Section 4 contains our findings and Section 5 draws together our conclusions.

The aim of this paper is to expand and broaden the literature on SME financing by investigating the role of cultural variables in determining capital structures. Employing a database of over 90,000 observations across 13 countries, we find that significant cross-country differences in capital structure are partly explained by cultural variables. These effects are generally stronger than firm-characteristic, industry or institutional effects. Uncertainty avoidance is negatively related to long-term debt, confirming SME owners' desire to avoid heightened business risk, and interference from debt providers (Esperanca et al., 2003, Cressy, 2006) This result highlights the intention to avoid adverse consequences of financial distress, including the considerable negative effects on the owner's reputation and self-esteem Such consequences may not be as severe in relation to short-term debt, for which the result is converse. The negative relationship between long-term debt and the degree of individuality suggests that issues of “…individual freedom and self-actualization…” (Hofstede & Hofstede, 2005: p. 109, p. 434) are important for SME owners in seeking to maintain autonomy and retain control. Levels of short-term debt affect these considerations to a lesser degree, which may explain the contrary result in relation to this source. Indeed, employing short-term debt rather than long-term debt increases flexibility and reduces autonomy-restricting adherence to covenants, restrictions and increased monitoring. The negative relationships between power distance and debt suggest that SMEs in small power distance states have a more consultative role with financial institutions. We propose that the ability to engage in negotiations for debt financing facilitates greater access to debt, or at least the opportunity to negotiate debt facilities. The positive relationship between masculinity and long-term debt suggests that the values of “…challenge, earnings, recognition and advancement…” (Hofstede & Hofstede, 2005: p. 132, p. 434) result in firm owners pursuing growth demonstrating a greater appetite for debt. We propose that this view is consistent with the contrary result observed for short-term debt. Indeed, similar to results observed for the Uncertainty avoidance and Individuality measures, these effects highlight the complex and varied issues in establishing the determinants of SME capital structures, particularly the decision to employ long-term versus short-term debt. The magnitude of coefficients for models employing cultural variables suggests that these measures are important in determining capital structure, and are significantly larger than those for models investigating firm, industry and institutional characteristics. Results for models employing firm-characteristic variables are broadly consistent with previous studies, highlighting the role of firm age, size, asset structure, growth opportunities and profitability in determining debt ratios. A novel result of our study is that the relationships between short-term debt and collection and credit periods are positive and negative respectively. Results indicate that short-term debt increase with debtors' time to payment, and diminishes with length of credit proffered by creditors. Whilst this result is not unexpected, it is heretofore unreported in large scale studies in the SME literature. Whilst the inclusion of institutional variables captures a significant amount of cross-country differences in financial, legal and regulatory systems and structures, there may be notable variations in debt ratios depending on whether a financial system is bank-based (Germany, for example) or market-based (United Kingdom, for example Demigurc-Kunt and Levine (1999). Additionally, differences in banking systems and institutions across countries can potentially account for variations in capital structures. Hofstede and Hofstede (2005: p. 19, p. 434) argues that institutions also follow “…mental programs in the way they adapt to local culture”. Thus, institutions are also subject to the mores and conventions of national cultures. In order to fully comprehend the influence of legal and financial systems on capital structures, it is necessary to understand the societies in which they operate. Consistent with previous studies there are significant sectoral differences in short- and long-term debt ratios. Firms in the primary sector employ higher levels of long-term debt than all sectors, and use less short-term debt than all sectors apart from the manufacturing and retail and wholesale sectors. This result is not unexpected, although it is not possible to discern the primacy of sectoral over firm-level variables. Institutional variables were included in the study to capture cross-country differences in access to money, regulatory quality, economic freedom and legal and property rights. These factors could possibly dominate and/or override cultural effects of financing. Consistent with previous research legal and property rights and regulatory quality are positively related with long-term debt. Other results are less conclusive, suggesting that these issues have less relevance in relation to levels of short-term debt. The importance of cultural considerations in SME capital structure has implications for policy makers. For example, SMEs in high uncertainty avoidance countries preference short-term relative to long-term debt. These financing preferences may expose firms to excessive risk, and weaken the sustainability of the SME sector. Policies designed to improve access to finance or improve the capital mix may not succeed because of the deep and powerful consequences of cultural influences. Even if governments attempt to impose policies in relation to provision of SME finance, they may not succeed, as they will be thwarted by the over-arching effects of culture. Thus, policy makers must be aware of these potential pitfalls when designing initiatives. This does not mean such policy initiatives will fail – intelligent policy makers will be able to utilise cultural factors to design initiatives, which will succeed. Our paper has implications for further research. Firstly, there remains the need for broad cross-country SME studies, notwithstanding the burgeoning of research in recent years. Secondly, researchers should examine the implications of these cultural factors in bank-based systems, such as Germany, in contrast with countries which have market-based systems, such as the UK. Thirdly, researchers might conduct a comparative study employing the Schwartz and GLOBE dimensions of national culture. Additionally, researchers could conduct more sophisticated statistical tests on this data which will result in improvements in efficiency. Finally, a research agenda of mixed methods, deploying qualitative as well as quantitative studies to deeply probe how cultural norms impact would be most useful.