We analyze the impact of language on risk-taking behavior of banks. Languages that grammatically distinguish between present and future events make the future feel more distant than the present and as thus favor a less future-oriented behavior (Chen, American Economic Review, 2013 ). Our hypothesis is that these languages lead banks to take more risk since they reduce the perception of potential losses associated with risky activities. We investigate this hypothesis on a sample of 1401 banks from 81 countries over the 2010–2017 period. We perform random effects regressions of bank risk, measured by the Z-score, on the type of language. We find that banks from countries with future tense marking take more risk in accordance with our prediction. This finding is robust to the inclusion of alternative culture indicators, to alternative definitions of bank risk and of future time reference. We also observe that future tense marking is associated with greater occurrence of banking crises. Our conclusion is thus that language contributes to explain the cross-country differences in bank risk-taking.

中文翻译：

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语言如何塑造银行风险承担

我们分析了语言对银行风险承担行为的影响。在语法上区分现在和未来事件的语言使未来感觉比现在更遥远，因此有利于不那么面向未来的行为（Chen，美国经济评论，2013 年）。我们的假设是，这些语言会导致银行承担更多风险，因为它们减少了与风险活动相关的潜在损失的认知。我们对 2010 年至 2017 年期间来自 81 个国家的 1401 家银行的样本进行了调查。我们对语言类型进行银行风险的随机效应回归，由 Z 分数衡量。根据我们的预测，我们发现来自具有未来时态标记的国家的银行承担更多风险。这一发现对于纳入替代文化指标是稳健的，银行风险和未来时间参考的替代定义。我们还观察到，未来时态标记与银行危机的更多发生有关。因此，我们的结论是语言有助于解释银行风险承担的跨国差异。