Cultural values and the global financial crisis: a missing link?

We empirically investigate the role of cultural values on the occurrence of the global financial crisis. We use data based on Hofstede (Culture’s consequences: comparing values, behaviors, institutions and organizations across nations, 2001) cultural values indexes and employ two econometric approaches, the self-organizing maps and logit, in a panel set of 38 developed and developing countries. We find that culture has a statistically and economically significant effect on the occurrence of the global financial crisis of 2007–2009. The relationship between cultural factors and the crisis occurrence remains strong when we consider control variables representing different sectors of the economy.