Hofstede (1980)’s cross-country psychological survey of IBM employees shows that some countries (societies) are systematically more tolerant of uncertainty, while tolerance of uncertainty is shown by Rigotti et al. (2003)’s model to be essential to the growth of “emerging sectors about which little is known”. We use Durnev, Morck and Yeung (2004)’s methodology to identify these informationally opaque industries. We hypothesize that, countries characterized by high uncertainty aversion (measured by Hofstede’s indicator) will, because of uncertainty aversion, grow disproportionately slower in industrial sectors where information is less available (proxied by lower informativeness of stock prices in the U.S., Durnev et al. 2004). Using the Rajan and Zingales (1998) “differences-in-differences” methodology, in 34 countries and 36 manufacturing industries, we indeed find robust evidence for this pattern of industrial growth. We also show that national uncertainty aversion is not proxying for under-development of financial sector, inadaptability of civil law systems, lower level of economic development, or many other factors. Our results are also robust when we use religious (Protestant/Catholic) composition to instrument for national uncertainty aversion.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by EconWPA in its series Macroeconomics with number
0507020.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)