Working capital management and CEO age

Robert B. Burney, Hui Liang James and Hongxia Wang

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, 2021, vol. 30, issue C

Abstract: The existing literature provides strong evidence that working capital management affects a firm’s performance and value. In this paper, we examine how CEO age affects firms’ working capital decisions. Using a sample of 28,243 firm-year observations of U.S. firms from 1993 to 2018, we find that net operating working capital increases with CEO age, and firms with younger CEOs hold lower levels of inventory and higher levels of payables. The results are robust to various model specifications and variable definitions, providing strong and robust evidence that younger CEOs tend to implement more aggressive working capital management policies (Aggressive strategy hypothesis). The findings provide important insights to the board of directors, investors, and various monitoring groups.

Keywords: CEO age; Level of career concerns; Net operating working capital; Aggressive strategy; Conservative strategy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G30 G31 G35 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221463502100040X

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:beexfi:v:30:y:2021:i:c:s221463502100040x

DOI: 10.1016/j.jbef.2021.100496

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance is currently edited by Michael Dowling and Jürgen Huber

More articles in Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().