The effect of language use on the financial performance of microfinance banks: Evidence from cross-border activities in 74 countries

Sougand Golesorkhi, Roy Mersland, Rebecca Piekkari, Grigory Pishchulov and Trond Randøy
Additional contact information
Roy Mersland: UIA - University of Agder

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: This multi-year study examines the relationship between financial performance and language use, observing 405 partnerships between microfinance banks and their international financial partners in 74 countries. Drawing on language research in international business, we find that microfinance banks based in English-speaking, French-speaking, and Spanish-speaking countries have higher performance.Furthermore, the linguistic distance between the home country of a microfinance bank and the home country of its international partner(s) is negatively related to its financial performance. Our large-scale study confirms the effect of language use on organization-level financial performance and extends research on language in multinationals from intra-firm to inter-firm relationships.

Keywords: language in business; English; French; Spanish; microfinance; inter-firm international partnership; firm performance; language in business English French Spanish microfinance inter-firm international partnership firm performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-05221022v1
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Journal of World Business, 2019, 54 (3), pp.213-229. ⟨10.1016/j.jwb.2019.03.002⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-05221022v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05221022

DOI: 10.1016/j.jwb.2019.03.002

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().