The Effect of Managerial Ability on Capital Market Stability
ZHANG Lu, LI Jincai, YUAN Zhenchao, YUE Heng
College of Economics and Management, China Agricultural University;
Beijing Capital Airport Food Management Co., Ltd.;
College of Economics, Shenzhen University;
School of Accountancy, Singapore Management University
Summary:
After nearly 30 years of development, China's A-share market has gradually become the second largest capital market in the world. However, the capital market is not stable. The sharp decline in stock price can lead to a major loss of investors' wealth and is not conducive to the healthy and stable development of capital markets. Therefore, reducing the risk of sharp decline in stock price has become a hot topic. Existing literatures attribute the risk of sharp decline in stock price to managers' self-interested hoarding of bad news from the perspective of agency costs and information asymmetry. Managers' behaviors are mostly viewed within the framework of principal-agent theory and are regarded as homogeneous. However, managers are at the heart of business operations, and their personal characteristics, such as perceptiveness, cognitive ability, and values, significantly influence corporate decisions (Hambrick and Mason, 1984). In modern companies, managerial ability is reflected in managers' efficiency in transforming corporate resources into value, relative to their industry peers (Demerjian et al., 2012). Compared with low-ability managers, high-ability managers can accurately understand technology and industry trends,effectively predict product demand, improve project investment efficiency, organize employees, and reduce the moral hazard caused by information asymmetry. Therefore, managerial ability plays a decisive role in ensuring the realization of business objectives. We explore how managerial ability affects capital market stability using a sample of China's A-share listed firms from 2007 to 2020. Our main proxy for managerial ability is derived from the DEA-Tobit model developed by Demerjian et al. (2012). According to the literature, we use the negative coefficient of skewness of firm-specific weekly returns and the down-to-up volatility of crash likelihood to measure the risk of sharp decline in stock price. The results indicate that managerial ability is significantly and negatively related to both measures of the risk of sharp decline in stock price, suggesting that managerial ability effectively mitigates stock price crash risk. We find that the effect of managerial ability on the risk of sharp decline in stock price is more pronounced for non-state-owned enterprises, for firms with a lower holding ratio of major shareholders, and for firms with lower levels of marketization. We also discuss the potential mechanisms by which managerial ability can reduce the risk of sharp decline in stock price. We find that managerial ability results in the reduction of a firm's risk, as measured by performance volatility and litigation. Similarly, we find that managerial ability improves corporate governance, as measured by the management expense ratio, discretionary accruals, and information transparency. These findings provide direct evidence that managerial ability reduces the risk of sharp decline in stock price by decreasing a firm's risk and improving corporate governance. This study may have several theoretical and practical contributions. From the theoretical perspective, the current literature on the risk of sharp decline in stock price mostly uses the principal-agent framework to analyze the negative impact of managers' self-interested behaviors. We investigate the positive effects of managers from the perspective of managerial ability and find that managerial ability mitigates the risk of sharp decline in stock price. Thus, our results supplement the literature on the factors affecting the risk of sharp decline in stock price. In addition, analyzing corporate behavior from the perspective of managerial heterogeneity has become a hot topic. Compared with demographic factors, such as age, gender, and education, managerial ability is a more comprehensive manifestation of managerial heterogeneity. Our conclusions clarify the importance of managerial ability in business development and enrich the literature on the economic consequences of managerial ability. In terms of practical implications, our findings indicate that the relevant policy makers should take effective measures to stimulate and protect managerial ability.
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