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This paper aims to examine the extent to which the cultural dimension of individualism/collectivism matters for international differences in climate change policy performance. This study postulates that individualistic societies, relative to their collectivistic counterparts, are more likely to address global climate change.

The main hypothesis is tested using data for a world sample of up to 92 countries. To achieve causal inference, this study isolates exogenous sources of variation in individualistic cultures, based on blood distance to the UK and historical pathogen prevalence.

The core results suggest that individualistic countries are characterized by greater climate change policy performance. This study also finds evidence that individualism affects climate change policy adoption through enhancing governance and female political representation. Subnational analyses based on data from the World Values Survey indicate that survey participants with an orientation toward individualism tend to self-report positive attitudes to pro-environmental policies.

The main findings help improve the understanding of the deep origins of climate change policy performance, which is relevant for formulating policies that help mitigate the consequences of changing climate conditions.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper is the first study to link cultural traits of individualism and climate change policy performance across countries.

This paper seeks to determine whether family ties and structure correlate with the ethical and moral values that are important underpinnings of economic activities.

The analysis uses data from the World Values Survey (WVS). Given the multilevel nature of the data in a cross-country setting, the paper utilizes a multilevel linear mixed-effects model with maximum likelihood estimation.

Families with strong ties and those with traditional family structures are less tolerant of unethical conduct and have more restrictive moral values than households where ties are weak and the household is not married. There also appears to be a bi-causal relationship in the data.

This paper considers a broad array of values in a cross-country setting and utilizes a multilevel modeling approach that has not been done in studies linking both family ties and structure.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-12-2021-0730.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the potential link between Sweden’s high reliance on equity capital financing among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and its recognition as the most innovative economy in Europe according to the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS). This paper examines the idea that the high levels of trust within Swedish society can explain why private equity financing is more prevalent among Swedish SMEs.

To test these ideas, the authors use data from the Survey on Access to Finance for Enterprises to measure the private equity reliance of firms. The authors also use the EIS to measure the innovation capacity of nations and various aspects of SMEs’ innovation activities. Finally, societal levels of trust are measured through the World Value Survey.

First, the authors find that European countries with a higher proportion of SMEs relying on equity financing tend to be ranked as more innovative by the EIS. Second, the authors find that the correlation between a nation’s share of SMEs relying on equity financing and their level of innovation activities is marginally stronger for product innovations than for business process innovations. Third, the authors find that countries with higher levels of trust tend to have higher equity capital reliance among SMEs.

This study builds upon previous research on equity capital and SMEs’ innovation activity while introducing new insights into the relationship between societal trust and equity financing.

National cultures significantly explain cross-country differences in the relation between asset growth and stock returns. Motivated by the notion that managers in individualistic and low uncertainty-avoiding cultures have a higher tendency to overinvest, this study aims to show that the negative relation between asset growth and stock returns is stronger in countries with such cultural features. Once the researchers control for cultural dimensions, proxies associated with the q-theory, limits-to-arbitrage, corporate governance, investor protection and accounting quality provide no incremental power for the relation between asset growth and stock returns across countries. Evidence of this study highlights the importance of the overinvestment hypothesis in explaining the asset growth anomaly around the world.

The purpose of this article is to investigate the impact of Confucianism on growth under different political regimes.

The empirical specification adopts a two-regime panel threshold model proposed by Hansen (1999) to endogenously divide our country sample into two-regime-types – autocracy and democracy – according to a country's democratic stock or experiences.

The results show that the effect of Confucianism on growth exhibits an asymmetrical pattern depending on the status of a country's political democracy. Only when a moderate level of freedom has already been attained can Confucianism have a positive effect on growth. Conversely, for autocracies whose democratic institutions cannot pass a certain threshold, Confucianism has a very limited effect in terms of changing economic activity.

If the data with different sample years and/or different sample countries are used, the research results may lack generalizability. Further tests of the two-regime model with different data sizes are encouraged.

The authors use the World Values Survey (WVS) map to identify the countries under the influence of Confucianism. The authors emphasize that focusing only on political geography may overlook the information from the spread of cultural traits that accompanied the migration of people. So, based on the Confucian countries suggested by the WVS and the migration matrix of Putterman and Weil (2010), an immigration-based Confucianism variable was constructed. To accommodate different effects of Confucianism on growth in different phases of political development, the empirical specification adopts an asymmetrical pattern to investigate the impact of Confucianism on economic performance.

The purpose of this study is to explore the ideological gaps across a range of policing interactions with the public.

In a survey distributed via Mechanical Turk (MTurk) (n = 979), the authors explore the role that respondents' political ideology plays in the agreement of 13 aspects of policing services, their demeanor and decorum.

Attitudes toward policing interactions are slightly positive. Conservatives steadfastly hold positive attitudes about police. Liberals vacillate from negative to positive attitudes across the 13 policing interaction statements.

Although small, there is an ideological consensus that police adequately protect citizens and are knowledgeable about the law.

Even at record lows of public confidence in the police, some subsections of the sample, such as conservatives, firmly hold positive attitudes about police. The unwavering support for police by conservatives continues across the multi-item measure of policing interactions, whereas liberals illustrated less uniformity in their attitudes.

This paper analyzes the role that the climate change concern (CCC_i) has on the willingness to accept an environmental tax. The author aims to grasp how individual general tax preferences can differ with respect to the specific (environmental) tax. He focuses attention to the Italian case since it has been argued that the potential acceptability of a carbon tax in Italy is relatively high, and this topic has been scarcely explored so far among Italian citizens (Rotaris and Danielis, 2019).

The author conducted an online survey among 514 Italian economics students.

The CCC_i positively influences the environmental tax morale (ETM_i). The general tax morale (TM_i) positively affects the specific (environmental) TM_i. The CCC_i alters individual tax preferences. The author evidenced that also subjects with low TM_i turned out to be willing to pay an environmental tax if aware of the environmental issues.

Although the author used a common methodology in this strand of research, he is aware that in an online survey individuals can be influenced by the self-reporting and hypothetical choice bias (see Swamy et al., 2001), that in turn can characterize their reported preferences. Moreover, even if economics university students are commonly used as a subject pool in experimental economics settings, and although several studies showed that the behavioral responses of students are largely the same as those of nonstudents in identical experiments (for a discussion see Alm, 2012; Choo et al., 2016), there is awareness that in this case, they are not taxpayers yet (Barabas and Jerit, 2010).

The author’s results remark the importance of increasing climate change awareness among people to let them be more willing to pay the environmental tax, for instance through investments in sensibilization campaigns on the importance of energy source usage and climate-related topic. Then, an increase in the general TM_i leads to an increase in the specific (environmental) TM_i. The author’s evidence showed that people with high tax morale logically recognize the positive impact of paying an environmental tax when the CCC_i increases, since the more the theme becomes important, the larger the willingness to pay the specific tax. For this reason, policymakers should carry on campaigns to increase the general level of TM_i to increase the overall tax compliance level and the relative tax revenues, following the guidelines given by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (2019) to support taxpayer education programs, such as including TM_i research and analysis into education programs, improving the ease of paying taxes or strengthening revenue–expenditure links to build the social contract.

It should be paramount to increase awareness about environmental topics among people in general and among those who are relatively tax immoral. The author’s results remark on the importance of targeting energy and environmental tax policies to groups rather than to individuals. According to this evidence, we support the use of nonmonetary tools to nudge people in the environmental transition by changing their behavior in energy use, for instance through the taxation on fuel and other nonrenewable energy resources.

It is the first empirical study that analyzes the impact of CCC_i on the environmental TM_i in Italy, in particular controlling for the role of the general willingness to pay taxes (TM_i). To obtain individual attitudes toward tax payment, most of the empirical studies in behavioral economics employ international surveys. For studies across citizens living in European countries, the European Social Survey (ESS) and European Values Study (EVS) represent the most used ones (see, for instance, Martinez-Vazquez and Torgler (2009) in Spain; Torgler and Werner (2005) in Germany; Nemore and Morone (2019) in Italy). However, these surveys do not allow to study the relationship between the environmental and general TM_i across the same subject pool. In fact, despite the ESS (2016) provides individual responses about the willingness to pay an environmental tax, it does not provide information about the general individual attitude toward tax payment (this information is contained only in the ESS wave of 2004, hence referring to a different subject pool). On the contrary, each wave of the EVS (i.e. 2008, 2017) provides information about the general individual attitude toward tax payment, but this survey does not provide a question regarding the willingness to pay an environmental tax. Therefore, to obtain information about the willingness to pay both general and environmental taxes, across the same subject pool, it is needed to carry out a survey.

The aim of this article is to explain why there is a higher degree of trust in some countries compared to others – and which are the main historical factors that explain these differences. The main focus is on how governments relate to and communicate with its citizens in the times of crises.

The analysis is based on comparative historical sociology with a modernity perspective with a special focus on Norway and Scandinavia. The authors do a parallel demonstration of history to confirm and expand the theories that could explain the high level of trust in these countries. The authors also bring in the Spanish experience in order to testify how governmental reactions affected the different levels of trust.

Scandinavian governments allowed open communication between different social classes on difficult and important issues, in contrast to Spain in the same period. These two factors therefore expand the understanding of the development of trust: (1) The establishment of the nation state as the organising concept and all-encompassing container of the other institutions (democracy, parliamentarism, trade unions, etc.); (2) The open hand strategy in dealing with deviant opinions, based on democratic compromises and a policing of consent ideology.

The article combines the understanding of the first crisis of modernity and the development of trust and contain a comparative analysis of the development of trust in four different countries. The investigation thus clarifies the correlation between specific historical factors and the levels of trust.

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a systematic review of the factors that shape tax morale. A large range of random explanatory variables identified in the literature as determinants of tax morale are synthesised and structured by drawing inspiration from the institutional theory.

To do this, a systematic search has been conducted using a library catalogue which provides access to more than 400 databases.

The finding is that the institutional theory provides a suitable theoretical basis to explore tax morale. Indeed, all the factors until now identified as determinants of tax morale (except the control variables/socio-demographic characteristics) can be categorised either as belonging to formal institutions or to informal institutions. The most salient factor is trust, with both vertical and horizontal trust positively related to tax morale.

The outcome is a call for a more nuanced understanding of not only the effect of formal and informal institutions on tax morale but also how formal and informal institutions interact and alter each other and, consequently, affect tax morale.

The paper seeks to encourage governments to start recognising that as low tax morale arises when a gap exists between formal and informal institutions, they need to design policy measures aimed to reduce this gap, rather than persisting with deterrence measures.

This is the first systematic review of the factors that influence tax morale using an institutionalist lens.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of cultural leadership factors (charismatic/value-based, team oriented, participative, humane, autonomous and self-protective) on the rates of opportunity and necessity entrepreneurship.

The study integrates insights from institutional and cultural leadership theories to provide a fresh perspective to advance comparative entrepreneurship research. To test the hypotheses, the authors conduct a multiple regression analysis with observations from 34 countries, using data (from the year 2013) from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor for the dependent variable and from Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness to create leadership factors as independent variables.

The results show that all the types of leadership considered in the study have a relevant effect on entrepreneurial activity. However, charismatic leadership has a greater effect on entrepreneurial activity, particularly on opportunity entrepreneurship. The research also shows that autonomous leadership has a negative impact on entrepreneurial activity, although, when it is moderated by the humane dimension, this relationship changes.

Since the alternative dimensions facilitate or inhibit the generation of new firm creation, it is critical for researchers, teachers and leaders to learn about and to foster such leadership types.

This research covers a gap in the cross-cultural evidence presented in the literature and suggests the integration of the concepts leadership and entrepreneurship.