Cultural Secrecy, Enforcement, and Stock-Price Crash Risk

Marți, 26 mai 2026 – ora 16:00 – sala 3M4 (etaj 1, clădirea Moxa)

Alexandru Todea

Facultatea de Stiinte Economice si Gestiunea Afacerilor, Universitatea Babes Bolyai; alexandru.todea@econ.ubbcluj.ro

Abstract:

This study investigates how cultural secrecy – an information-restraining accounting norm – shapes firm-level stock-price crash risk across countries. Using 377,696 firm-year observations from 49 markets over 2000–2022, we find that secrecy is associated with lower subsequent crash risk on average. Yet this effect is not uniform. when countries are grouped into high- and low-corruption regimes using the World Bank’s Control of Corruption index, secrecy raises crash risk where enforcement is weak but reduces it where enforcement is more credible. Subsample tests confirm a strong and precisely estimated stabilizing effect in low-corruption markets and a weaker, noisier destabilizing effect in high-corruption environments. A mediation analysis shows that this pattern reflects two channels – earnings opacity and idiosyncratic volatility – which transmit the influence of secrecy only in countries with functioning enforcement. These results indicate that secrecy does not inherently promote managerial concealment; instead, its stabilizing or destabilizing role depends on the institutional context in which cultural norms operate.

Zoom:
https://ase.zoom.us/j/88975840175?pwd=Q0ZnbHl0TjhqcEtzVnhMUWRmdWdPQT09

Activitate de socializare: TBD