Corporate complexity, managerial myopia, and hostile takeover exposure: Evidence from textual analysis

Pattanaporn Chatjuthamard, Viput Ongsakul and Pornsit Jiraporn

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, 2022, vol. 33, issue C

Abstract: Exploiting a novel measure of firm complexity based on textual analysis (Loughran and McDonald, 2020), we explore the effect of hostile takeover exposure on firm complexity. Our results demonstrate that more takeover vulnerability leads to less complex firms. Hostile takeover threats diminish managers’ job security and thus exacerbates managerial myopia. Short-sighted managers focus on short-term investments at the expense of more complex, long-term, projects, resulting in lower corporate complexity. Our measure of takeover susceptibility is principally based on state legislation, which is plausibly exogenous. Therefore, our results are more likely to reflect causality than merely an association. Further analysis corroborates the results including propensity score matching, entropy balancing, an instrumental-variable analysis, and using Oster’s (2017) method for testing coefficient stability.

Keywords: Complexity; Takeovers; Hostile takeover; Corporate governance; Market for corporate control (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G28 G34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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/S2214635021001453

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:33:y:2022:i:c:s2214635021001453

DOI: 10.1016/j.jbef.2021.100601

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 ().