Bureaucrats as Successor CEOs
55 Pages Posted: 6 Oct 2016
Date Written: 2016
Abstract
Chinese companies sometimes appoint a government official (bureaucrat) as CEO on the expectation of benefiting from the political connections of the new hire. Based on a sample of 2,454 CEO transitions our empirical findings are consistent with the implications of a simple contract model in oligopolistic markets. Firms that appoint a bureaucrat as CEO obtain more credit and subsidies. They have positive abnormal announcement returns, negative abnormal long-run returns and larger variance of long-run returns. Furthermore, they experience a deterioration in operating performances, increased rent-seeking behavior of the management and weakening of corporate governance. The results from the split share structure reform in 2005 corroborate the supportive findings for the preferential treatment hypothesis.
Keywords: bureaucrat, corporate political connections, CEO successions in China, governance
JEL Classification: G32, G34, M13
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