Generalist CEOs and stock price crash risk
研究发现，拥有跨行业通用技能的通才CEO更少隐藏坏消息，从而降低公司未来股价崩盘风险，尤其在劳动力需求强或代理冲突严重时效果更明显。
Abstract We investigate whether generalist chief executive officers (CEOs), that is, CEOs who gain transferable skills across firms and industries, have less incentive to hoard bad news. To address endogeneity concerns stemming from firm–CEO matching, we deploy a difference‐in‐differences method utilizing exogenous CEO turnovers, propensity score matching and entropy balancing matching methods, and Oster's coefficient stability test. Supporting our conjecture, we find a negative relation between CEOs’ general ability index (GAI) and future stock price crash risk. The effect of CEOs’ GAI on crash risk is stronger when labor demand is stronger and when firms have more agency conflicts. Our analysis further suggests that generalist CEOs attenuate crash risk by increasing conditional accounting conservatism and reducing real earnings management. Taken together, our findings highlight the role of CEOs’ general human capital in increasing their tolerance for failure and mitigating the agency problem.