Cultural Differences, Dialect Feature and M&As

Li Lu; He Yuqian; Tang Xiaoyan

doi:doi:10.16538/j.cnki.jfe.2018.06.010

Summary

With a vast territory and a long history, China has a unique and diverse regional culture. Due to geographical, historical and political reasons, local dialects in different regions have become important carriers of Chinese regional culture. In other words, the unique linguistic environment, as an important part of regional culture and an informal system, exerts a profound influence on corporate governance.　　M&A events, involving a large number of participants and fierce competition of interests, represent the allocation and reorganization of resources. In the process of M&As, dialect background is a kind of corporate capital to facilitate its own action. Specifically, the same or similar dialect background is somehow a natural link between the acquirer and the target company, making it easier to mobilize resources, facilitate transactions and enhance post-M&A performance.　　Using the dialect data fromLanguage Atlas of China and manually matching the linguistic differences between the acquirers and the target companies, we identify acquisitions made by listed companies between 2000 and 2012. After controlling the geographic factors and various economic factors（transaction characteristic, characteristics of the acquirers and the target companies, etc.）, we find that the greater the dialect distance is, the less the shareholder value is. Further analysis shows that this correlation exists when the informal institutions play a complementary role or information asymmetry is serious, however, this correlation is weaker to some extent with the popularization of Putonghua. In view of the inherent problem of endogeneity in the study of culture and corporate governance, this paper takes some measures such as tool variable method, control missing variable and random effect model. Our studies provide the evidence that through specific corporate financial behavior, dialects have a significant effect on economic issues like corporate governance.　　Different from previous researches, this paper explores a new perspective on how to measure corporate cultural differences. We use the structure of Chinese dialects as our definition of corporate culture and match the linguistic distance between different companies manually. At the same time, this paper expands the discussion of dialects in corporate governance through digging into a specific corporate financial behavior. It also provides the micro evidence that dialects affect corporate economic performance. The research in this paper shows that the dialect, as an important representative of regional culture, exerts its influence on a company’s specific financial activities when playing its role of human capital and culture identity. The scope of such impacts may also be reflected in other economic decisions of enterprises, confirming the influence mechanism that informal institutions play an important role in economic development.　　This paper also has some limitations. Firstly, there are some controversies over the dialectal classification in China. The classification method adopted in this paper is mainly based on the Chinese Language Atlas compiled by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Its classification method is more authoritative, which can ensure the accuracy of dialect regional division. However, the dialect division in some disputed areas may still cause some controversies. Secondly, although this paper attempts to solve the endogenous problem in several ways, the problem still remains. Maybe one day it could be solved by the exogenous changes in future dialect policies or new research methods. Thirdly, the language mentioned in this paper plays the role of a cultural proxy variable, besides, its impact on thinking mode may have a more important position in future studies.