Wei Du

This paper investigates the relationship between national culture and the early adoption of Bitcoin. Utilizing a dataset comprised of Google Trends data on Bitcoin search interest for 64 countries, we construct measures of early Bitcoin adoption and examine their correlation with Hofstede's cultural dimension scores. Our findings reveal that in developed countries, lower Masculinity and Long-Term Orientation are associated with earlier Bitcoin adoption. In contrast, developing countries with lower Indulgence are found to adopt Bitcoin early. This paper contributes to the literature by highlighting how different cultural traits, moderated by a country's development status, can influence the Bitcoin early adoption.

Bondholders are arm’s-length lenders with limited insider information. In this paper, we explore whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities could work as an information channel for bondholders to better understand the riskiness of bond-issuing firms. We find a significant negative relation between CSR scores and corporate bond yield spread, especially for firms which invest heavily in diversity and community relations, suggesting that CSR firms are less risky. The result is robust to different model specifications and endogeneity issues. In addition, the negative relation between the CSR score and bond yield spread is significant only if a firm has a strong internal governance mechanism.

In this paper, we document evidence that intra-industry uncertainty has a positive relation with firm valuation. Specifically, the reduction of intra-industry uncertainty about firm future profitability leads to a decline of firm ME/BE ratios over time. We find that the positive relation is more prominent for firms in high-tech sectors and those with intensive product market competition. Our results are robust to the control of firm-level uncertainty and alternative measures of intra-industry uncertainty. TOPICS:Fundamental equity analysis, statistical methods