Organizations and Markets

Guiso, Sapienza, and Zingales on Corporate Culture

8 November 2013 at 4:02 pm Peter G. Klein 2 comments

| Peter Klein |

Luigi Guiso, Paola Sapienza, and Luigi Zingales tackle the elusive concept of corporate culture in a new NBER paper. Using survey data from the Great Place to Work Initiative they show that firm performance is higher, other things equal, when employees perceive top management as trustworthy and ethical. They control for corporate governance variables and try to separate the effects of an ethical culture from the halo effect that distorts perceptions of high-performing firms. The data are cross-sectional, so it’s impossible to say that a strong corporate culture causes strong performance, rather than the other way around, but the findings are extremely interesting nonetheless.

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