Finance Research Seminar – Dr Kai Li
The Finance Research Group welcomes Dr Kai Li.
She will present her work, entitled "Set in Stone: The Persistence and Origin of Corporate Culture."
About the speaker
Dr Kai Li is Canada Research Chair in Corporate Governance at UBC Sauder School of Business and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She is Managing Editor of the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis and has published extensively in leading finance journals. Her work covers corporate governance, gender and finance, and machine learning in finance.
Research abstract
We examine the evolution of corporate culture and trace its origins, distinguishing the values and norms prevailing within firms from the preferences of insiders.
Using one of the largest panel datasets on corporate culture, we find that it is remarkably stable: firms with strong (or weak) cultures tend to remain so over time. Much of the variation is driven by firm-level fixed effects linked to conditions around the initial public offering.
We show that founder characteristics—including cultural heritage, birthplace, and early career environment—as well as the firm’s founding time and location, all shape early corporate culture.
We also find suggestive evidence of CEO-firm matching on cultural values, offering insight into the persistence of culture. Our findings highlight how a firm’s early identity continues to influence its internal values and practices for years to come.