Behavioral Finance and Stock Market Investing. The Importance of National Culture (PDF)

Master's Thesis from the year 2018 in the subject Business economics - Investment and Finance, grade: 1,3, University of Bremen, language: English, abstract: The aim of this paper is to propose a model for cultural finance and to develop theory-based hypotheses on stock market investing. In contrast to the inductive financial research, a deductive approach is offered here to connect widely-accepted behavioral hypotheses on the stock market.

Understanding behavioral influences on an investor's decision-making surprisingly has not been driven much by the acknowledgment of the mediating role of culture. While behavioral finance criticizes excessive simplifications regarding an investor's behavior according to the homo oeconomicus, it makes the unrealistic assumption that actors exhibit universal biases and equally apply heuristics when facing different choices of action.

This paper addresses cultural finance as an important background variable and suggests a conjoint effect with behavioral finance. This means that the culture can enhance, decrease or reverse biases and heuristics which are still mostly examined in the United States and only replicated in western countries. The paper is encouraged to implement cultural finance as a future research field.