THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE CULTURAL DIMENSIONS OF COUNTRIES AND THE RISK OF BANKING INSTITUTIONS
National Culture; Banking Risk; Formal Institutions.This research aims to assess how the relationship between national culture occurs, based on Hofstede's cultural
dimensions – individualism versus collectivism and uncertainty avoidance – on banking risk. Thus, the specific
objectives are to verify the relationship between Hofstede's cultural dimensions of individualism versus collectivism
and prevention of uncertainty about bank risk and to verify if this relationship is impacted by the moderation of formal
institutions, thus, this research contributes to the development of the cultural finance literature. To carry out this study,
the cultural dimensions of Hofstede (2010) were used, limiting the cultural dimensions of individualism versus collectivism
and uncertainty prevention, the government effectiveness indicator of Kaufmann et. al (2007) to represent formal
institutions and the risk of insolvency represented by the Z-SCORE as a dependent variable of banking risk, allowing
the analysis of 1,238 listed commercial banks distributed in 79 countries on five continents. Thus, it was decided to
estimate two MQO linear regression models, with and without the presence of moderating variables so that it would be possible
to verify whether and how the moderating variables affect the relationship between national culture and banking
risk. Thus, in the first model, without the presence of moderating variables, it was found that there is no statistically
significant relationship between the cultural dimension of individualism and banking risk, but unlike what is reported
in the literature, there is a positive and statistically significant relationship between prevention and uncertainty and
banking risk, it being important to point out that uncertainty is not synonymous with risk and generally countries
with high uncertainty avoidance tend to risk known risks. In estimating the second model, with the presence of
moderating variables, it was observed that the direct relationship between the variable that represents individualism
and banking risk remained without statistical significance and the direct relationship between the uncertainty
prevention variable and banking risk passed not showing statistical significance. However, it is observed that in the
relationship of the moderating variables – MOD_IDV and MOD_UAI – with banking risk, it was possible to identify
a negative relationship with statistical significance for both relationships. Thus, this result corroborated that formal
institutions affect the relationship between national cultures and banking risk.