The consequence of societal secrecy for the financial constraints faced by firms

Does the level of societal secrecy aggravate or alleviate access to finance? We explore this question for 51,249 firms in 39, predominantly developing, countries, from 2006 to 2015. We find a strong positive relationship between cultural orientation towards secrecy in a country and financial constraints faced by its firms. Our results are robust to several considerations and emphasize the adverse consequence of societal secrecy for perpetuating financing obstacles for firms.& COPY; 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).