Cultural proximity and cross-border banking flows

Abstract

This paper disentangles the impacts of cultural proximity on cross-border banking flows, using large country-pair data from 1996 to 2019. On applying the gravity model with the Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood estimator, our main findings show that cultural proximity is both a push and pull factor, which robustly anticipates increased outflows (cross-border lending) and inflows (cross-border borrowing). The impacts of cultural proximity are transmitted throughout the information asymmetry and cost reduction channels. These impacts become pronounced for geographically proximate country pairs and hold for a different measure of cultural goods taxonomy and for controlling the endogeneity problem.