Board secretary’s financial experience, overconfidence, and SMEs’ financing preference: Evidence from China’s NEEQ market
研究中国新三板中小企业董事会秘书的财务经验如何影响融资偏好，发现具有财务经验的董秘偏好外部融资，降低投资-现金流敏感性，且过度自信的董秘更倾向外部融资。
This article explains the impact of the board secretary’s financial experience on the financing preference from the perspectives of executive behavior and psychology. We use small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) listed on China’s National Equities Exchange and Quotations (NEEQ) market as an empirical research sample and confirm that SMEs who have board secretaries with financial experience prefer external financing, thus lowering the investment-cash flow sensitivity. Additionally, the empirical conclusions are robust after changing the measurement of financing, expanding the scope of financial experience definition, and removing state-owned SMEs from the sample for robustness testing. We also control for the endogeneity using a placebo test, PSM-DID, and instrumental variables. In further research, we find that overconfident secretaries prefer external financing; secretaries with financial experience can reduce information asymmetry to promote external financing, albeit mostly short-term loans.