The research on corporate finance issues from the perspective of institutionality, especially informal institutionality, is an emerging direction of today’s academic research. Using a corporate－level dataset of the listed companies in Shanxi, Shaanxi, Zhejiang and Jiangsu over the period of 2006-2012, from the perspective of informal institutionality, culture, this paper studies the impact of mercantile culture on corporate risk taking and the difference of the impact in the companies of different types of ownership property, and further investigates the economic consequence of corporate risk taking. The results show that: the listed companies affected more strongly by the mercantilist culture have a higher level of risk taking than the other listed companies. Compared with non－state owned companies, the impact of mercantile culture on corporate risk taking in state owned companies is relatively smaller. From the economic consequence of risk taking, the improvement of corporate risk taking is conducive to enhance firm value. This paper enriches and expands the related research on institutional environment and corporate risk taking, and it also provides important implications for better understanding the important value of traditional culture in today’s economic and social life and for the companies to value the risky investment.