管理者过度自信与企业投资行为异化——来自我国证券市场的经验证据

CEO Overconfidence and Distortion of Firms’ Investments:Some Empirical Evidence from China

本文以非金融类A股上市公司为研究样本,考察了管理者过度自信与企业投资行为的关系。研究发现,过度自信的管理者倾向于过度投资,并对融资活动产生的现金流有更高的敏感性。即当公司有充裕的融资活动现金流时,过度自信的管理者会过度投资;反之,则投资不足。本文还发现,过度投资与经营活动产生的自由现金流之间的敏感性基本上不受管理者过度自信心理特征的影响,这与其它一些研究的结论不一致。

Based on A-shares listed companies of China, this paper studies the relationship between CEOs overconfidence and firms＇ investment. We first define a CEO as an overconfident one if his company＇s earnings forecast is higher than its actual earnings at least once. Then we measure over-investment as investment exceeding those payout maintaining exist assets and for new investment items with expected positive NPV. After controlling such factors as growing opportunity, size etc., we find that overconfident CEOs tend to over-invest, and their investments are sensitive to cash flow from financing. That is, when their firms have abundant cash flow from financing, overconfident CEOs will over-invest, or they will under-invest. We also find that the sensitivity between over-investment and free cash flow has little relationship with CEOs mental characters, which is different with other studies. To make sure that our results are robust, we conduct robust test. First, we replace the variable of CEO overconfidence. If presidents of the firms increase their shares of their firms during our sample period, we define them as overconfident ones. Second, we replace other variables such as grow opportunity and corporate governance. Based on these new variables, we take new test and find the same results as above which prove that our results are robust. These results show that CEO over- confidence can lead to distortion of firms＇ investment. When firms get money from the capital market, overconfident CEOs tend to over-invest. Overconfident CEOs tend to up-value risk and downvalue return which cause some items with negative NPV to be accepted and which can bring loss to shareholders. So it is necessary for firms to establish scientific and rigorous managing mechanism about investment.