高管政治背景对其离职—业绩敏感性的影响

Political Connections of CEOs and Turnover-performance Sensitivity

政治背景作为高管的社会资源,会对公司的内部治理效率产生影响。通过对2004-2011年中国A股民营上市公司的1330个样本进行实证分析,本文研究了高管政治背景对其离职—业绩敏感性的影响。研究发现,总体而言,公司高管离职的可能性与业绩水平显著负相关;在考虑政治关联因素的影响后,政治关联能够显著地弱化高管离职的可能性与业绩水平的负相关关系,亦即高管的政治背景能够降低其离职—业绩敏感性。

CEOs turnover and its link to firm performance have been the focus of large and growing literature because they provide a critical measure of the effectiveness with which a firm solves the principal-agent problems. The relationship between CEOs turnover and performance could be indicative of the quality of corporate governance in a firm. The political connections of CEOs facilitate the government＇s rent seeking from the listed firms. Since the gov- ernments control the major resources, the political connection will be an important considerations when the firms making a decision on whether to retain the CEO. In a relationship-based economy such as China, because of the non-separation of politics and business and personal good relationship with government, the CEOs who are former government officials can become entrenched or they can get more bailouts from the government even if they perform poorly. Unique to existing literature, we study a sample of family firms for two reasons： First, most CEOs of state-owned enterprises （SOEs） are nominated by governments to facilitate their intervention; their turnover may not be linked to performance. Second, SOEs have multiple objectives to perform, including reducing the regional unemployment rate and fiscal deficit. As a consequence, because of heavy policy burdens and the soft budget constraints of SOEs, the poor performance for these politically connected firms may not necessarily lead to CEOs turnover. Hence, we cannot say that political connections reduce the turnover-performance sensitivity for effective governance reasons in SOEs. Using a sample of family firms listed in China＇s A-share market from 2004 to 2011, this study investigates the effects of CEOs＇ political connections on turnover- performance sensitivity. We find that the rate of political connected CEOs turnover is lower than average. Furthermore, we show that CEOs turnover is significantly and inversely related to firm performance. In addition, we find that this turnover-performance link is much weaker for connected CEOs.