客户集中度、CEO背景特征与企业费用粘性

公司费用支出的粘性特征是管理会计研究的核心问题之一,文章以2001-2015年的A股上市公司作为研究对象,实证研究了公司的客户集中度对企业费用粘性的影响,研究发现公司向第1大客户的销售额比例、向前5大客户的销售额比例以及前5大客户销售额的集中度越高,公司的费用粘性越强。在此基础上,文章进一步考察了CEO的背景特征对于上述关系的影响,发现CEO的年龄较大、任期较长以及学历较低时,客户集中度对于企业费用粘性的影响更为显著。文章的研究发现揭示了客户关系对于企业费用粘性的重要影响,同时也丰富了管理者背景特征对于企业费用粘性影响的文献,支持了管理者过度自信和代理问题的有关研究发现。

Customer Concentration,CEO Characteristics,and Expense Stickiness

Expense stickiness is one of the core research topics in the area of cost management and managerial accounting. It refers to the asymmetric changing pattern of selling and administrative expenses with that of sales. Customers are one of the most important forces in forming companies' competitive environments. A lot of research in Accounting and Finance find that customer concentration or powerful customer has significant influence on companies' financing, investing, accounting, and information disclosure decisions. Using a sample of Chinese A share listed companies from 2001-2015, this paper examines the relationship between customer concentration and the asymmetric behavior of selling and administrative expenses. Based on relevant literature, we explore the relationship between customer concentration and expense stickiness and develop two competing hypotheses. On one hand, there may exist an alignment relationship between powerful customers and companies. Frequent communication and cooperation can alleviate the information asymmetry problem and then reduce relevant transaction costs. Therefore, companies with higher level of customer concentration may have a lower degree of expense stickiness. On the other hand, the strong bargain power of powerful customers can lead to "hold-up" problems. To maintain the business relationship and avoid customers' turnover, companies keep the same level or even spend more selling and general administrative expenses when companies' sales are down. In other words, powerful customers can also exacerbate the degree of expense stickiness. We use different measures of customer concentration in order to assure the robustness of our paper, including the percentage of sales to the biggest customer, the percentage of sales to top five customers, and the Herfindahl index of top five customers' sales percentages. We find that the degree of expense stickiness is positively associated with customer concentration. Therefore, the empirical findings in our paper support the "hold-up" hypothesis of powerful customers' influence on expense stickiness. Moreover,this paper examines the effects of CEO demographic characteristics on the relationship between customer concentration and expense stickiness. We show that the positive association between customer concentration and expense is stronger when CEOs are older, have longer tenure, and have lower level of education. This result may be explained by CEOs' overconfidence and/or agency problems. Our main results are consistent when we use chairmen' demographic characteristics as proxies. To deal with the potential endogenous issues, we select gross margin, the percentage of intangible assets in total assets, and the percentage of capitalized R&D expenditures in total assets as instrumental variables and run two-stage regressions as robust test. The main results are still held with instrumental-variable regressions. In all, we provide direct evidence that customer concentration affects selling and administrative expenses stickiness. As a result, this paper contributes to the literature of cost structure decisions in managerial accounting. By showing the effects of powerful customer on expense stickiness, our paper also provides new insights into the consequences of powerful customer or customer concentration. Finally, our study contributes to the literature that examines the impact of management characteristics on cost stickiness and makes supplementary evidence for management overconfidence and agency problem studies.