Does the cutoff of “red capital” raise a red flag? Political connections and stock price crash risk

Min Zhang, Yaosong Liu, Lu Xie and Tingting Ye

The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, 2017, vol. 39, issue C, 89-109

Abstract: Using a Chinese exogenous regulatory setting that forbids political officials from sitting on boards, we investigate whether disruption to political connections induced by independent director’s forced resignation increases the firm’s stock price crash risk. The results show that firms announcing resignations of politically-connected independent directors after the regulation experience a significant increase in crash risk, suggesting that disruption to political connections intensifies managers’ bad-news hoarding behavior and makes firms more crash-prone. We further find that the negative impact of disrupted political connections on crash risk is less pronounced in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) than that in non-state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs). Moreover, the association is more salient when the resigned director has a geographic and industrial working background overlapping with the firm’s operation. Our findings are consistent with the notion that heightened resource acquisition pressure caused by disruption to political networks increases stock price crash risk.

Keywords: Political connections; Mandatory resignations; Stock price crash risk; Ownership property; Geographic and industrial relevance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G32 G38 H70 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1062940816301899
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:ecofin:v:39:y:2017:i:c:p:89-109

DOI: 10.1016/j.najef.2016.12.002

Access Statistics for this article

The North American Journal of Economics and Finance is currently edited by Hamid Beladi

More articles in The North American Journal of Economics and Finance from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().