This study examines the impact of culture on regulation and corruption. Our empirical results suggest that cultural values have significant effects on countries’ regulatory policies, levels of corruption, and economic development. Contrary to the conclusions drawn by others, this study shows no significant relationship between the regulatory policies of countries and their perceived levels of corruption. Thus, evidence of the ‘‘public choice view’’ toward entry regulation derived in related studies seems to be at least attenuated.

Based on the cross-time-section series data collected from Wall Street Journal(WSJ), this article suggests that the corruption perceptions index (CPI) for 60 countries/regions published by Transparency International (TI) is highly correlated to their WSJ news about “corruption”, especially for the eight strong countries. Comparing with a slight converging trend of standard deviation of CPI value, the score of CPI presents no significant response to the time dimension. Despite of the strong correlation, our partial multiple correlation models suggest that, WSJ news can be really regarded as one good indicator of the level of corruption in a country, rather than the potential cause influencing CPI. Some discussions about the correlation between the WSJ news and some other corruption indicators confirm our above findings.

Efficient top management processes are crucial for firm performance, not only because of the high importance of strategic decision-making and governance for shareholder value creation. Hence, conflict and, correspondingly, the appropriate management of conflict have grown in importance, especially when considering the high uncertainty that is coupled with strategic decision-making due to fast changing environments and new, emergent strategic options nowadays. Therefore, this study examines the relationship between demographic characteristics, job stress, and cognitive and affective conflict that Chinese top managers face. Through survey data and analysis, we conclude that age is in negative relation with job stress and that the higher the educational level of top managers, the more cognitive conflict they will experience. In turn, the more cognitive conflict, the more affective conflict will be experienced. In addition, we find that job stress is in positive association with cognitive conflict. Finally and most importantly, our results indicate that Chinese top managers are inclined to using integrating to handle conflict, which seems to be generally inconsistent with the traditional Chinese culture.