Keck Graduate Institute, Claremont, California, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2013 May 15;8(5):e60911. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0060911. Print 2013.
In this study, we focus on the impact of senior executives' industry backgrounds on the amount of capital raised in the stock market. The primary contribution of the study entails applying the upper echelon theory to the initial public offering (IPO) phenomenon. Specifically, we hypothesize that the industry backgrounds of corporate executives affect the amount of capital that the firm raised in the primary stock market. We argue that the firm's future investment strategies are unobserved by the investors ex-ante and investors expect firms' investment strategies to be based on the executives' industry backgrounds. As a result, the executives' industry backgrounds influence the investors' expectations about what investment strategies the firm is likely to deploy. Furthermore, the above logic also suggests that executives of different industry backgrounds should prefer different investment strategies corresponding with demand for different amount of capital. As a result, we expect the industry backgrounds to covary with the capital raised from both the supply and demand perspectives. To test the hypotheses, we ran a reduced econometric model wherein the executives' background predicts the amount of capital raised. Regression analyses suggest that the capital raised is negatively associated with the number of senior executives with prior career experience in the healthcare and genomic sectors but positively associated with the number of senior executives with prior career experience in regulatory affairs. The results provide tentative support for the notion that investors infer corporate strategies from senior executives' industry backgrounds.
在这项研究中，我们关注的是高管的行业背景对公司在股票市场上筹集资金数量的影响。该研究的主要贡献在于将高层梯队理论应用于首次公开发行（IPO）现象。具体来说，我们假设公司高管的行业背景会影响公司在一级股票市场筹集的资金数量。我们认为，投资者在事前无法观察到公司的未来投资策略，并且投资者预计公司的投资策略将基于高管的行业背景。因此，高管的行业背景会影响投资者对公司可能采用的投资策略的预期。此外，上述逻辑还表明，具有不同行业背景的高管应该更喜欢与不同数量的资本需求相对应的不同投资策略。因此，我们预计高管的行业背景会与从供需两个角度筹集的资金数量相关。为了检验这些假设，我们运行了一个简化的计量经济学模型，其中高管的背景预测了筹集的资金数量。回归分析表明，筹集的资金数量与具有医疗保健和基因组领域先前职业经验的高管人数呈负相关，但与具有监管事务领域先前职业经验的高管人数呈正相关。研究结果初步支持了投资者从高管的行业背景推断公司战略的观点。
