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In the context of a two-tier governance system, this study aims to investigate whether CEO overconfidence affects firm risk. In addition, this study examines the moderating role of the founder CEO on CEO overconfidence and firm risk.

This study uses a composite score index of CEO overconfidence with a sample of nonfinancial firms listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange from 2012 to 2019. It tests the research hypothesis with multiple linear regression analysis.

The findings indicate that CEO overconfidence reduces firm risk. In contrast, the founder CEO does not affect the relationship between CEO overconfidence and firm risk.

This study supports the upper echelon theory that argues that firms’ top management affects firms’ outcomes and behaviors.

The top management team heavily affects firms’ outcomes and behaviors in a two-tier governance system. Furthermore, firms’ selection policy of overconfident CEOs will be improved because these CEOs can diversify firm risks more effectively.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to examine the role of the founder in the relationship between CEO overconfidence and firm risk.

The purpose of this paper is to determine how CEO overconfidence influences firm’s future risk in a sample of Chinese listed firms. It further examines the moderating effect of institutional investors on the association between CEO overconfidence and future firm risk.

The initial sample consists of Chinese A-share issuing firms listed on Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges during the period starting from 2000 to 2017. This study classifies a CEO as overconfident if the forecasted profits of the firm are greater than the actual profits for majority of the time during the tenure of the CEO. Ordinary least squares regression is used as the primary estimation method for generating the results, however, firm fixed effects and two-stage least squares regressions have also been used for verifying the robustness of the results.

The results demonstrate that CEO overconfidence leads to an escalation in firm’s risk level over the subsequent years. However, the intensity of this positive association is weaker in state-owned firms. Analysis of the moderating effect of institutional investors reveals that only active institutional investors, specifically mutual funds and foreign institutional investors, play their governance role in reducing the effect of CEO overconfidence on firm’s risk level. Furthermore, the moderating effect of active institutional investors is weaker in state-owned firms.

The empirical evidence obtained by this study suggests that CEOs should exercise extreme diligence in decision-making. They must analyze a situation based on realistic facts and figures, rather than having misperception about their excessive abilities in controlling the outcomes of a situation. The findings also imply that regulators and policymakers should formulate strategies for motivating mutual funds and foreign investors to increase their shareholding in Chinese firms.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that examines the impact of CEO overconfidence on future firm risk, not the current firm risk. Besides, literature regarding the role of external governance mechanisms in the context of behavioral biases is extremely scant. This study contributes to the literature by analyzing how the association between CEO overconfidence and firm’s future risk is influenced by the institutional investors’ ownership.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically analyze whether and how managerial overconfidence affects stock price crash risk.

Based on a large sample of Chinese non-state-owned firms from 2000 to 2012, this study employs methods including multiple linear regression model, Heckman two-stage treatment effect procedure, firm fixed effects model and event study to clarify the causality relationship between managerial overconfidence and crash risk.

The authors find that firms with overconfident managers (chief executive officer or board chairs) are more likely to experience future stock price crashes than firms with non-overconfident managers. The effect of overconfidence on crash risk is more pronounced for firms with low transparency, suggesting that firm opacity facilitates overconfident managers’ bad news hoarding activities, which, in turn, increases stock price crash risk. The authors also show evidence that overconfident managers tend to disclose good news in a timely manner.

The authors add to the growing literature on stock price crash risk. Specifically, the authors find that the cognitive bias of board chair plays an important role in the bad news hoarding activities, thereby increasing the likelihood of stock price crash. This study also contributes to the literature that addresses the effects of managerial overconfidence on corporate finance issues.

Overconfidence as an important psychological factor can also affect CEO’s cognitive preferences, while there are few studies about the impact of CEO’ overconfidence on the international expansion of companies. This paper aims to fill this gap and further discuss the moderating role of CEO’s overseas experience, CEO duality and ownership.

The authors focus on the Chinese context, collect 2008–2016 data from China's manufacturing industry as sample, use fixed effect model to analyse the effect of CEO overconfidence on international expansion strategy of Chinese firms.

The empirical results show that: CEO overconfidence positively promotes the degree of firm internationalization. CEO foreign experience positively affects the internationalization degree, but can restrain overconfidence thus negatively regulate this impact relationship. When duality is present, both CEO power and managerial discretion are pronounced and they exhibit a stronger effect. Firm’s equity nature will affect the relationship between CEOs' overconfidence and the degree of internationalization. Compared with private enterprises, CEOs in state-owned enterprises have limited power, therefore, this influence relationship is weaker.

This study has emphasized the importance of top executives' psychological characteristics on firm internationalization, which is key application and complement of upper echelons theory and fills the research gap in the literature. In this paper, the authors found the advantages of overconfidence for firms, which helps to understand the complex meaning of overconfidence. The results of moderating effect further explore the application of overconfidence in different context, which has some implications for management practice.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the association between corporate risk and the interaction between CEO incentive compensation and CEO overconfidence.

This empirical study performs random and fixed effect (FE) regression analysis. It uses option-implied measures of CEO overconfidence.

The authors contribute to the existing literature by showing (1) that the positive association between high CEO incentive compensation and corporate risk only exists in the sphere of overconfident CEOs and (2) that the positive association between overconfident CEOs and corporate risk only exists in the sphere of high CEO incentive compensation. The authors show that the combination of high CEO incentive compensation and CEO overconfidence is associated with an increase in corporate risk of approximately 6% while the individual effects are for all practical reasons negligible. The results imply that only the combination of high CEO incentive compensation and CEO overconfidence is associated with a significantly elevated level of corporate risk.

The findings are based on S&P 1500 non-financial firms in the period 2007–2016.

The findings have important implications in terms of CEO selection and compensation.

This study provides empirical evidence on the importance of the dual presence of high CEO incentive compensation and CEO overconfidence for corporate risk. The previous literature has primarily investigated these phenomena in isolation.

This paper aims to find alternative explanations for the use of long-term debt in the US restaurant industry from a behavioral perspective. The three-fold purpose of the present study is to examine the impact of CEO overconfidence on the use of long-term debt; explore how CEO overconfidence moderates the relationship between growth opportunities and long-term debt; and analyze the moderating role of CEO overconfidence based on cash flow levels in the context of the restaurant industry.

Using a sample of publicly traded US restaurant firms between 1992 and 2015, this study used generalized methods of moments with instrumental variable technique to analyze the panel data.

The findings of this study highlight the importance of considering behavioral traits of CEOs, such as overconfidence to better understand the US restaurant firms’ financing behaviors. This study found that overconfident CEOs tend to use more long-term debt when firms have greater growth opportunities and low cash flow.

Given that psychological and behavioral features of CEOs are critical in understanding the variations in corporate financing decisions and capital structure, shareholders and boards of directors of growth-seeking restaurant firms should incorporate the behavioral aspects of overconfident CEOs in the design of long-term debt contracts to mitigate liquidation risk while developing compensation practices that encourage overconfident CEOs to finance growth.

Despite its heavy reliance on long-term debt in the US hospitality industry, prior studies provided mixed findings for the determinants of long-term debt. This study makes a contribution to the literature by offering alternative approaches to examining long-term debt decisions among US restaurant firms.

The authors study the relationship between CEO overconfidence and litigation risk by examining employee-level lawsuit data. The purpose of this paper is to better understand the executive characteristics that potentially affect the likelihood of employee litigations.

The authors employ a unique data set of employee lawsuits from the National Labor Relations Board – “Disposition of Unfair Labor Practice Charges” – which includes complaints, litigations and decisions. The data spans the years 2000–2014. The authors employ the option-based CEO overconfidence metric of Malmendier et al. (2011) as the primary explanatory variable.

The authors find that overconfident CEOs are less likely to be subjected to labor-related litigations. The authors document that firms with overconfident CEOs have fewer lawsuits opened by both labor unions and individuals. The authors then investigate the effect of employee litigations on firm performance to understand why overconfident CEOs are less prominent among lawsuits. The authors show that litigations lower corporate investment and value of capital expenditures for responsible firms, which may limit overconfident CEOs’ ability to invest. Therefore, the results may reveal the fact that overconfident CEOs may prefer to align with the interest of their employees to avoid reduced investment opportunities.

The paper makes three main contributions. First, it provides the first large-sample evidence on CEO overconfidence and labor relations. The authors employ data on firm-level labor litigation that contains both the case reason and case outcome. Second, this paper adds to the growing literature of CEO overconfidence and governance practices in the workplace. Finally, the study highlights the importance of employee treatment and explores the impact of labor lawsuits on firm value.

Anchored in the role of a social arbiter, the purpose of this study is to examine whether and how media coverage has an impact on CEO overconfidence and further explore how media ownership and Confucianism affect the relationship in the Chinese context.

Using a sample of 1,492 Chinese listed companies from 2010 to 2015, the study adopts random effects models to empirically analyze the effect of media coverage on CEO overconfidence and the roles of media ownership and Confucianism.

The paper finds that media coverage is significantly and positively associated with CEO overconfidence, and the positive relationship between media coverage and CEO overconfidence becomes stronger for state-controlled media. What is more, the influence of media coverage on CEO overconfidence is attenuated for those firms located in stronger Confucianism atmosphere. A further analysis reveals that different tenors of media coverage yield asymmetric effects.

The paper provides a new and solid support for the argument that media praise stimulates CEO overconfidence and increases the knowledge about under what conditions CEO overconfidence varies, broadly speaking which fosters the development of upper echelons theory (UET). Meanwhile, the results extend the literature on media effect and information processing. The findings are also beneficial to improve corporate decisions and government regulation on Chinese media systems.

This paper contributes to the literature as follows. First, it examines if option and stock compensations raise creditor's risk, and which one is more important than the other. Second, it explores if CEO's compensation interacts with CEO overconfidence to raise creditor's risk. Third, it investigates how banks use different loan terms to alleviate their credit risk.

This study used advanced regression analysis and use of generalized methods of moment methodology.

The results show that option compensation is more important than stock compensation in raising credit risk; option compensation interacts with CEO overconfidence, giving rise to a much higher credit risk; and covenant usage is more important than other loan contract terms in mitigating credit risk given that covenant use could not be substituted away by using other loan contract terms such as increasing interest rate, reducing principal or shortening loan duration. This paper has practical implications for credit markets.

The main implication is that hand-collect data are available up to 2010.

It informs creditors the potential sources of loan risk emanating from option rather than stock incentives; it informs creditors that option incentive interacts with CEO overconfidence rendering the credit risk bigger than expected, and it informs creditors the importance of using covenants vis-à-vis other loan contract terms for mitigating compensation and overconfidence risk.

Banks are alerted to the risk due to the interaction between overconfidence and compensations, implying that overconfident managers remunerated with options compensations are more risky than overconfident managers who are not remunerated as such.

This paper is original: (1) The authors show that option compensation is more risky than stock compensation from viewpoint of creditors. This has not been assessed. (2) Interaction between managerial compensation and managerial overconfidence has not been assessed before. (3) Use of different loan contract terms to alleviate risk from overconfident managers (who are prone to over investment but who are innovative according to the literature) has not been evaluated.

This study examines whether the behavioral attributes, such as overconfidence, of chief executive officers (CEO) and chief operating officers (COO) affect firm's inventory leanness. If they do, how are they interacting with each other? Moreover, incorporating market competition into the analysis, this study explores how the competition moderates the relationship between managerial overconfidence and inventory leanness.

Using a large panel data of US manufacturing firms between 1998 and 2015, this study measures top managers' overconfident characteristics using stock option information. Then, a panel regression analysis is adopted to test the effects of managerial overconfidence on inventory leanness. Moreover, a moderation model is applied to investigate the interaction effects of market competition.

Firms with overconfident COOs (CEOs), other circumstances being equal, increase (decrease) the inventory leanness as the market becomes more competitive.

The study suggests that firms should understand top managers' behavioral characteristics to manage inventory efficiently. Collectively, CEOs (COOs) tend to increase (decrease) inventory levels due to their overconfidence as the market gets competitive. Firms should establish a systematic process to be reviewed by diverse stakeholders to deal with managerial overconfidence.

This study is an exploratory study that examines whether and how top management's behavioral attribute relates to a firm's operations performance. It underlines that CEO and COO's overconfident characteristics determine the inventory leanness when market competition is considered. Numerous studies on firm-level strategies emphasized the top managers' overconfidence as a key factor. However, behavioral characteristics at the top management level have rarely been studied in operations management fields. Based on the results, scholars could compare and understand the effects of CEO and COO overconfidence to provide insights into inventory management.