The national culture of chief executive director (CEO) and bank-risk taking: Evidence in developing countries

National culture is attracting the attention of scholars, particularly in thefinancial field, as many recent studies have confirmed the critical role of culture in the stability of the banking system. In this paper, we investigate the link between CEO’s national cultural values and bank risk-taking. Using an unbalanced panel dataset which contains national cultural values of 395 CEOs who work for 237 commercial banks in 21 countries over the period 2011-2017, we find that bank risk-taking is negatively associated with CEOs who score high in the individualistic cultural dimension. Also, we see that bank risk tends to increase under the management of high power distance CEOs