The Psychology of Corporate Investment Behaviour after the Global Financial Crisis in Slovenia

“Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga com’è, bisogna che tutto cambi”, “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change” (Lampedusa, 1958/2007, p. 40). Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard traces the decline of an old Sicilian aristocratic family that mistakes stagnation for self-preservation and, in refusing to evolve, cedes the future to a more ruthless new elite, better suited to the world taking shape around it. Inertia is built into every system, from human bodies to corporations and empires, and the only way to fight it is to keep moving. Older still than Lampedusa’s novel is the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita, in which Krishna counsels the warrior Arjuna to act but relinquish attachment to the fruit of the action (The Bhagavad Gita, 2007). This anticipates the emotional core of prospect theory: people judge outcomes as gains or losses against a reference point, and losses weigh more heavily than equal gains, so fear of loss (loss aversion) can paralyse action (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979).

My recent article asks an old question in a current setting: why do capable, liquid Slovenian companies so often choose the vault over the river? Weak business investment since the 2008 global financial crisis has been linked to slow productivity growth across advanced economies (Dlugosch et al., 2025). In Slovenia, business investment by corporations fell from 18.4 percent of GDP in 2008 to 11.7 percent in 2024, below the EU average of 12.8 percent (Eurostat, 2026a), while corporate deposits rose from 10.5 to 18.8 percent of GDP and loans fell from 88.3 to 36.5 percent; relative to debt, though not to GDP, these deposits are almost twice the euro-area level (Eurostat, 2026b). The shortfall concerns not only machines and buildings but also intangible investment, such as software, training and organisational capital, which is hard to borrow against and in which European firms lag most (Haskel & Westlake, 2018). Beyond loss aversion, people who live through a major crisis remain more risk-averse for decades (Giuliano & Spilimbergo, 2014; Malmendier & Nagel, 2011). We are therefore curious whether the high pre-crisis investment was a consequence of government subsidies and state-backed credit (Domadenik et al., 2018; Sila, 2015), and whether after the crisis we simply returned to our initial nature, or whether the post-crisis reluctance to invest is a form of trauma response.

Existing studies link CEO traits and crisis exposure to investment outcomes through archival data, surveys and statistical correlations (Bernile et al., 2017; Zhang, 2017), but cannot show the reasoning from the managers’/owners’ own perspective. This gap motivates our central research question: what psychological patterns, including beliefs, motives and narratives, lie behind the preference of managers/owners of Slovenian companies for cash holding over productive investment after 2020? We address it through semi-structured interviews, adding a firm-level view to the macroeconomic and industry-level evidence on investment-less growth. The pilot study was conducted through semi-structured interviews, each lasting 45–90 minutes, held in September and October 2026. Five research questions guided the interviews: optimism and risk attitude, the limits of acceptable risk, the influence of firm, social and cultural factors, the weight of personal traits against firm conditions, and the traits associated with successful investing.

The findings fall into six themes. First, optimism is tempered by experience, and firms invest above all in people: “I do not trust my optimism alone,” says one manager, while a private-equity fund manager among the respondents admits that “90% of my worry goes into putting the right people in the right place.” Second, risk is acceptable only when the firm can understand and control it: “If you put money somewhere where there are only unknowns and slides, that is very risky.” Third, crisis lessons, selective networks and the stigma of failure reinforce caution: “you must not be too indebted,” and “here, if you fail, it is the same as if you were a bad person.” All three respondents agreed with a Slovenian politician’s observation that “we are not a culture of mistakes” (Borec, 2025), and one traced the national mindset to a long memory of scarcity and a history without a native aristocracy: “our last noble families died out in the 15th century . . . Okay, we must not forget Barbara Celjska, whom you name as the first Melania Trump kind of Slovenian, but still.” Fourth, firm conditions and governance outweigh temperament: “First we check, then we feel,” and a manager may act as a brake on a risk-loving owner: “I am the counterweight.” Fifth, successful investing rests on experience, discipline, emotional stability and the art of saying no: “do fewer things rather than be everywhere.” Finally, non-investing appears as a way of being rather than a post-trauma response: the reluctance of older owners “is not a consequence of any crisis. That’s just how they are.” Yet the safety of money left on the account may be “illusory”: only by putting capital into play, even at the risk of losing it, does one gain the experience and confidence that leave one feeling psychologically empowered in the long term.

What holds firms back is less a lack of own funds than complexity, unrealistic prices of target companies, scarce external finance (domestic banks lend least when finance is most needed) and the lessons of past crises. The respondents also point to a cultural memory of scarcity, a stigma of failure and an ambivalence about wealth, while the private-equity perspective describes Slovenian companies as quickly satisfied with the return and growing “very conservatively, very slowly”. Successful investing is linked to experience, discipline, emotional stability and the art of saying no. The tentative answer to the study’s latent hypothesis is that post-crisis reluctance to invest is not a trauma response but mainly a return to an older cultural disposition, which the 2008–2013 crisis reinforced and hardened into explicit rules: low debt, cash flows rather than hope, and crises as an opportunity to buy. Pre-crisis investment looks rather like a credit-fuelled exception. The full article on the psychology of investment behaviours after the great financial crisis in our country will be published as a chapter of the scientific monograph Understanding Determinants Behind Investment-less Growth in Advanced Economies (working title), prepared by Prof. Polona Domadenik Muren, Prof. Matjaž Koman and Prof. Tjaša Redek.

References

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Dlugosch, D., Westmore, B., Glanville, M., Hooley, J., & Ozturk, F. (2025). Understanding the weakness in business investment. OECD Economics Department Working Papers. https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/en/publications/understanding-the-weakness-in-business-investment_89bd437d-en.html

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