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194Amid accelerating global transformation and profound environmental restructuring, the surge in corporate risk-taking poses a severe threat to the survival of firms, with excessive risk exposure prone to triggering cascading failures. Consequently, exploring governance models that balance development with security is critical for navigating China’s economic transition through volatile periods. This necessitates not only formal institutional designs but also informal institutions to forge corporate ethos.
Integrating business registration, supplier-customer, and A-share textual data, this paper employs Natural Language Processing (NLP) to quantify the continuity of national spirit and systematically examines its spillover effects and mechanisms on corporate risk-taking. The results indicate that: (1) The continuity of national spirit enhances managerial risk-governance capabilities, thereby stabilizing corporate risk-taking levels. (2) This governance effect is contingent, effectively mitigating excessive risk-taking without interfering with instances of under-risk-taking. (3) The continuity of national spirit incentivizes proactive hedging strategies, curbing excessive risk-taking through a dual pathway of supply chain diversification and innovation-driven responses.
This paper makes the following marginal contributions: First, it provides a contingent perspective on the interplay between informal institutions and corporate behavior, breaking the paradigm of viewing their relationship as static. The adaptive nature of this governance effect to firms’ risk states reflects the vitality of informal institutions. Second, it introduces national spirit as a novel organizational-cultural determinant in the study of corporate risk-taking. Third, it highlights the role of national spirit in boosting corporate innovation and optimizing supply chain risk structures.
The policy implications of this paper are as follows: First, give priority to informal institutions to create an institutional environment conducive to long-term sustainability, prudent management, and responsibility orientation. Second, establish specific supply chain risk monitoring and compensation mechanisms, encouraging firms to maintain sufficient redundancy to bolster systemic resilience. Third, leverage the innovative genes of national spirit to build an innovation-driven risk governance system.
