Publication Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

1-2016

Abstract

This study examines the association between chief executive officer (CEO) overconfidence and future stock price crash risk. Overconfident managers overestimate the returns to their investment projects and misperceive negative net present value (NPV) projects as value creating. They also tend to ignore or explain away privately observed negative feedback. As a result, negative NPV projects are kept for too long and their bad performance accumulates, which can lead to stock price crashes. Using a large sample of firms for the period 1993–2010, we find that firms with overconfident CEOs have higher stock price crash risk than firms with nonoverconfident CEOs. The impact of managerial overconfidence on crash risk is more pronounced when the CEO is more dominant in the top management team and when there are greater differences of opinion among investors. Finally, it appears that the effect of CEO overconfidence on crash risk is less pronounced for firms with more conservative accounting policies.

Keywords

Overconfidence, optimism, crash risk, conservatism

Discipline

Accounting | Corporate Finance

Research Areas

Corporate Governance, Auditing and Risk Management

Publication

Contemporary Accounting Research

Volume

33

Issue

4

First Page

1720

Last Page

1749

ISSN

0823-9150

Identifier

10.1111/1911-3846.12217

Publisher

Canadian Academic Accounting Association

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Additional URL

http://doi.org/10.1111/1911-3846.12217

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