Cultural Finance as a research field: an evaluative survey

Academic interest in cultural influences on financial decision-making has risen in the last decade leading to a considerable number of literature contributions in this field. However, the discipline of Cultural Finance is a very young and yet unstructured research niche with its added value being rather opaque than clearly defined. In this paper, we try to contribute to the enhancement of this research niche by (1) developing a structured framework in order to (2) systematically classify and evaluate Cultural Finance papers past to present. Based on the literature survey, we (3) deduct the main research subjects so far, and (4) assess the added value of Cultural Finance as a discipline. Concerning the latter, we find that Cultural Finance displays a revisiting function, since already well-researched questions in traditional finance can now be reconsidered more precisely in a new cultural light. Furthermore, Cultural Finance unfolds a supplementing function for broader concepts like Sustainable Finance by assessing the impact of social preferences on financial decision-making. In order to explore these two functions, we show that the less applied cultural dimensions of Schwartz are in favor of the more prominent Hofstede approach. We conclude that Cultural Finance as a discipline incorporates a pioneer role by delivering an approach that is able to cope with the challenges of financial decision-making against a multi-dimensional goal function of prosocial decision-makers.