Abstract This study examines whether regional speculative climate affects local firms’ cost of capital and explores whether the effect changes over time, based on the data in China from 2008 to 2020. The conclusions are as follows: ①The regional speculative atmosphere is proved to increase company’s capital cost; ②Time-invariant part has a more positive bias effect on the capital cost; ③The speculative atmosphere makes management tend to invest more in R&D and more aggressive working capital financing strategies, which weakens investor confidence and results in the increase of capital cost; ④The Buddhist atmosphere and CEOs from other places will enhance the positive effect on the cost of capital, which the latter is caused by the cultural spread of a more speculative atmosphere in CEO hometown.
