报告题目：Patrolling the Securities Laws: Towards the SEC’s Investigation of Founder-CEO Firms
报告时间：2023年7月27日（星期四）下午14:30-15:45
报告地点：科教楼B座1006会议室
报告人：王瑞祥
主办单位：经济学院
报告人简介：
Ruixiang Wang is an Assistant Professor of Finance at the School of Management at Clark University. He graduated from the University of Missouri, Columbia, with a Ph.D. in Finance. His research interests include Innovation, Corporate Governance, Executive Compensation, M&A, and Consumption-Based Asset Pricing.
报告简介：
Founder-CEO firms are associated with smaller discretionary accruals, lower stock return volatility, better firm performance, and less shareholder litigation. Yet, we find that founder-CEO firms are 18% more likely than an average firm to be investigated in secrecy by the enforcement division of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). This finding is robust to two instrumental variable regressions and a stacked difference-in-differences design, which alleviate the endogeneity concerns. Our channel analyses support the conjecture that the SEC’s interest in founder CEOs is primarily due to their idiosyncratic attributes, such as power, overconfidence, and risk-taking, highlighting the screening aspect of the SEC investigation as opposed to its punitive aspect. Further analyses show that founder CEOs’ visibility is positively associated with the likelihood of an SEC investigation against their firms. The SEC’s corporation finance division is also more likely to issue comment letters to founder-CEO firms. Overall, our findings are of potential interest to founder-CEO firms and investors interested in learning about SEC investigation risk, regulators concerned about founder-CEO firms, and academics studying SEC surveillance.
