| Chinese traditional business culture has many excellent cultural characteristics agree with the development of the financial market,such as "faithfulness","justice and profit","selfless" etc.,there are also speculative culture such as "eager for instant benefit","acting as the occasion demands" and "valuing profits over justice".A healthy capital market should have speculation,but the balance between investment and speculation in China has been lost,and the balance point is increasingly deviated from investment（Buffett,2017;Bogle,2017）.At the 40th anniversary of reform and opening up conference,General Secretary Xi Jinping put forward that we should attach great importance to the influence of culture on the economy,strengthen the system construction in the cultural field,and enhance the national cultural soft power.In the 2020 State Council Government Work Report,Premier Li Keqiang pointed out that we should cultivate and practice the core socialist values and resist the erosion of decadent and backward culture.The existing studies mainly focus on the positive economic effects of culture（such as promoting enterprise innovation,restraining the risk of stock price collapse,improving the corporate governance environment,etc.）,while the negative effects of traditional culture are rarely studied.At the same time,there is still a debate about whether speculation is a "stumbling block" or a "lubricant" for the development of enterprises.The findings shed light on understanding the "black box" between speculative culture and corporate financial behavior combing with the regional lottery sales in China,and make up for current research gap.In foreign countries,the ratio of Catholics to Protestants（Kumar,2009;KPS,2011;Rhee and Veeraraghavan,2014;Adhikari and Agrawal,2016;Lee,2017）and CEO religious belief（Schneider and Spalt,2017）are mostly selected as instrumental variables,domestic researches on speculative culture are mainly based on philosophy and sociology,and most of them adopt normative analysis paradigm.As China has the lowest proportion of religious belief in the world,it is not appropriate to explore the speculative culture of companies from the perspective of religious belief.In view of the psychological characteristics of Chinese lottery players,such as throwing a sprat to catch a herring,short-sighted,blindly optimistic,risk-taking,are in line with people’s values under the influence of speculative culture,this paper constructs regional speculative culture from the perspective of lottery sales and explores its economic consequences on this basis.According to agency theory,the separation of ownership from management in modern corporation system causes agency conflicts between managers and shareholders,large shareholders and small shareholders,so managers and large shareholders have the motivation to engage in speculation for personal interests.Company’s speculative financial behaviors are mainly reflected in its non-compliance with moral and credit constraints,and the use of information advantages for "adverse selection" or "moral hazard",which is specifically manifested in the characteristics of concealing information,exploiting institutional loopholes,and short-term behavior.Therefore,this paper will analyze four types of financial behaviors,such as the quality of accounting information disclosure,innovation investment,tax radicalization and enterprise performance.The main conclusions of this paper are as follows:Firstly,speculative culture can reduce the quality of accounting information disclosure by improving earnings aggressiveness and earnings smoothing.Enterprise characteristics,market competition,and external governance environment play an important regulating role.Grouping study finds that the effect of speculative culture on the quality of accounting information disclosure is more significant in the low-tech enterprises,the weak internal control enterprises,the monopoly industry,and the weak media supervision.Secondly,speculative culture has a significant inhibitory effect on the application of invention patents and utility model patents,but there is no evidence that speculative culture has an impact on the behavior of enterprises to apply for design patents.The analysis of intermediary channels shows that speculative culture inhibits enterprises’ innovation investment by increasing their real earnings management.The nature of enterprise property rights,geographical location and external governance environment play an important role in regulating.Further grouping study shows that the effect of speculative culture on corporate innovation is more prominent in private enterprises and companies located in the southeast of Hu Huanyong Line.The big four accounting firms can restrain the impact of speculative culture on innovation performance to some extent.Thirdly,speculative culture encourages enterprises to adopt radical tax policies.The level of corporate governance,the nature of property rights and external governance environment play an important regulatory role.High executive consumption and low corporate information transparency promote the positive relationship between speculative culture and corporate tax aggressiveness.The effectiveness of speculative culture in promoting enterprise tax radicalization is more prominent in enterprises with higher agency costs and state-owned enterprises.The strengthening of government tax collection and financial pressure increase the tax avoidance cost of enterprises,therefore restraining the positive relationship between speculative culture and tax aggressiveness.Finally,speculative culture promotes the short-term performance of enterprises,but significantly reduces the long-term performance of enterprises.In the short term,the speculative culture has a value-added effect.There is a positive correlation between speculative culture and short-term financial（market）performance.Increased uncertainty caused by frequent adjustments of economic policies deepens the positive value-added effect of speculative culture on the companies’ short-term performance and the negative effect on the companies’ long-term performance.The inter-group difference analysis shows that the short-term value-added effect of economic policy uncertainty on speculative culture only exists in the groups with high internal pay gap,non-state-owned enterprises and enterprises with market monopoly status,while this phenomenon does not appear in enterprises with low internal pay gap,state-owned enterprises and enterprises with high degree of competition.At the same time,the moderating effect of economic policy uncertainty affects the short-term financial performance more than the short-term market performance.The analysis of intermediary channels shows that speculative culture positively promotes the short-term performance of enterprises by increasing the degree of tax avoidance,and enterprises will reduce R＆D innovation in order to improve short-term performance.In addition,the short-term value-added effect of speculative culture will be amplified when the economic policy is uncertainty.In conclusion,under the background of the transformation and upgrading of China’s market system,this study provides a new idea to explore the relationship between speculative culture and corporate behavior,which has important implications:on the one hand,with the increasingly serious negative impact of speculative culture on social and economic development,the government needs to reasonably guide the development of speculative culture and issue relevant policies to alleviate the negative impact;On the other hand,enterprises should recognize the negative impact of speculative culture on their development,and reduce the probability of executives’ speculative behavior by optimizing the internal governance environment. |
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