Daniel Chi (Finance) recently had a research paper, “Is Language an Economic Institution? Evidence from R&D Investment,” accepted for publication by the Journal of Corporate Finance, which is considered an “A” journal in finance. The study shows that how a language describes the future affects the speaker’s perception about the timing of future events and has important economic consequences. For example, some languages have obligatory future tense, such as English; some languages don’t, such as Japanese or German. For countries whose languages don’t have future tense, R&D investment and innovation output are higher. The study identifies the economic mechanisms of this language effect. The paper is coauthored with Xunhua Su (Norwegian School of Economics), Bin Xu (University of Leeds), and Yun Tang (OECD).
