机构投资者"分心"与公司杠杆操纵

本文以机构投资者在其投资组合中注意力分配差异而产生的不同“分心”程度作为识别监督外在变化的手段,验证了其对企业杠杆操纵的重要影响。研究发现,上市公司会趁机构投资者“分心”而监督弱化时实施更多杠杆操纵行为,经稳健性检验后该结论依然成立。影响机制分析发现,机构投资者“分心”通过弱化其监督治理效应、降低公司股价信息含量进一步加剧企业杠杆操纵现象,使得企业得以隐藏真实杠杆水平,误导债权人以更低的资本成本借出资金,但也为企业的未来埋下隐患,致使企业潜在债务违约风险与财务风险增大。此外,在机构投资者“分心”加剧企业杠杆操纵的关系中,“去杠杆”政策实施和去杠杆压力发挥了正向调节作用。本文丰富了机构投资者“分心”经济后果研究,也为监管部门强化对企业监管提供了重要启示。

Distracted Institutional Investors and Corporate Leverage Manipulation

This paper examines how institutional investors are distracted from their portfolio companies by exogenous extreme returns shocks,which leads to changes in their attention to other portfolio companies and the intensity of external supervision,and thus has an important impact on corporate leverage manipulation.The study found that instead of passively being monitored,public companies often manipulate leverage when institutional investors are distracted.The influence mechanism test further found that the level of corporate governance and the content of stock price information played a partial mediating role between the distracted institutional investors and corporate leverage manipulation.The moderating effect analysis shows that the implementation of de leveraging policy and the greater the pressure of deleveraging increase,the greater the finaneing risk of enterprises,the more diffcult it is for enterprises to obtain credit financing,which further improves the positive impact of institutional investors'distraction on.corporate leverage manipulation.In addition,the analysis of economic consequences shows that the distracted institutional investors have intensified the corporate leverage manipulation,and can only increase the scale of corporate debt financing in the short term,reduce the cost of corporate debt financing,cannot substantially reduce corporate risk,but may make the company suffer greater debt default risk and financial risk in the future.Possible contributions to this paper include:First,unlike existing studies that mainly take institutional investors'field survey and shareholding ratio as indicators to measure the attention intensity of listed companies,this paper refers to the latest studies and adopts extreme returns occurring in unrelated industries in institutional investors’portfolios as exogenous shocks.It provides new evidence on how different levels of distraction caused by differences in the distribution of attention in the portfolio of institutional investors affect corporate behavior.Second,the existing research mainly discusses the listed companies through indirect ways to use a variety of unconventional accounting means to adjust the assets and liabilities items,to achieve the effect of window-dressing leverage.This paper adopts the newly developed method of leverage manipulation to investigate the incentives of corporate leverage manipulation,but few scholars pay attention to the influence of the degree of“distraction”of institutional investors on corporate leverage manipulation.This study further enriches the literature on the influencing factors of corporate leverage manipulation.Third,this article proves that in Chinese capital market the distracted institutional investors have a measurable and economically important influence,it also provides policy enlightenment for the regulatory authorities to strengthen the external supervision of listed companies and formulate relevant policies to effectively prevent corporate leverage manipulation.This study has important implications for management and policy.First,for listed companies,although leverage manipulation can enable them to obtain the required funds in the short term,it may be accompanied by potential unknown risks.Therefore,enterprises should fully recognize the negative impact and regulatory risks of leverage manipulation,remove unreasonable and excessive parts of the ex isting leverage structure,and effectively prevent debt default risk and financial risk.Second,institutional investors should give full play to their professional and information advantages,adhere to the concept of long-term value investment and supervision and governance,reasonably allocate their attention to portfolio companies,and strengthen the effective monitoring of portfolio companies.Third,for the regulatory authorities,on the one hand,they should reasonably plan the development route of institutional investors,optimize the structure of institutional investors,and give full play to their supervisory and governance role in listed companies;On the other hand,the regulatory authorities should judge the rationalty of the corporate leverage structure based on the actual situation of enterprises,strengthen the supervision of the leverage manipulation of listed companies,make up for the lack of external supervision.caused by the distracted institutional investors,and effectively restrain the opportunistic behavior of corporate leverage manipulation.