Contemporary Finance & Economics ›› 2023, Vol. 0 ›› Issue (1): 94-107.

• Business Administration • Previous Articles     Next Articles

CEO Stock Price Crash Experience and Enterprise Risk Taking: Common Occurrence or Self-Created Suspicion

XU Fei   

  1. Anhui Normal University, Wuhu 241000, China
  • Received:2021-09-21 Revised:2022-06-30 Online:2023-01-15 Published:2023-09-22

Abstract: Stock price collapse can seriously affect the healthy development of capital markets; it is urgently needed to study the specific impact of stock price collapse on the executive behaviors and enterprise operation. Based on sensory adaptation and the law of generalized fear, this paper puts forward two kinds of competitive hypotheses:“common occurrence”and“self-created suspicion”. It constructs an analytical framework of“stock price collapse experience -- CEO behaviors -- enterprise risk taking”to conduct an empirical test by using the data of A-share listed companies from 2007 to 2019, so as to reveal CEO's behavioral characteristics at the post stock price collapse stage. The main conclusions include:(1)CEO stock price collapse experience will significantly reduce the level of enterprise risk-taking, this verifies the view of“self-created suspicion”;(2)highly educated CEOs and male CEOs are more likely to reduce the level of enterprise risk-taking after experiencing the stock price crash, and the experience of stock price crash induced by corporate internal reasons has a more obvious negative impact on CEO risk-taking;(3)CEO's share price collapse experience mainly reduces the enterprise risk-taking level by reducing the enterprise's financial leverage, credit sales, bad debt losses, over investment and underinvestment, and by increasing the proportion of enterprise working capital. Therefore, the enterprise managers should not only pay attention to the antecedents of the stock price collapse, but also pay attention to the consequences of the stock price collapse, so as to serve the enterprise management practice after the stock price collapse.

Key words: stock price crash experience, risk taking, sensory adaptation, fear generalization

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