CEO Career Concerns And Voluntary Disclosure

Abstract

This paper investigates the relation between Chief Executive Officers (CEO) career concerns and voluntary disclosures using listed firm (KOSPI) data in Korea. Prior research suggests that explicit incentives in the form of CEO stock-based compensation or CEO’s equity ownership mitigate the agency problems of reluctance to make voluntary disclosure. In addition, implicit incentives arising from CEO career concerns are as important as explicit incentives for mitigating agency problems.The labor market assesses CEOs ability and CEO reputation in the market is a valuable asset that is associated with many long-term benefits, such as better future compensation, reappointment in the position, and greater managerial autonomy. CEOs are concerned about such an assessment and these concerns are referred to as career concerns. However, the market has incomplete information about CEOs’ ability especially when the CEOs have short tenures as a CEO position. Hence, CEOs with short tenures have more strong incentives to signal their ability to the labor market so that they can build proper reputation.Implicit incentives arising from CEO career concerns are measured by CEO tenure. I assume that short-tenured CEOs are more career-concerned than long-tenured CEOs. I find that CEOs with short tenures tend to more likely disclose management forecasts. I interpret this result that more career-concerned CEOs have strong incentives to signal their ability to the labor market in order to build their reputations which affect their future payoffs such as compensations and reappointment. In addition, management forecasts, means of voluntary disclosure, are used as effective mechanism. I also find that CEOs with short tenures tend to disclose more accurate management forecasts. This result implies that CEOs with more career concerns have more pressure to provide accurate forecasts because of their reliability in the labor market. Based on these empirical results, I infer that CEOs’ implicit incentives affect their voluntary disclosure decision.This study will contribute to academics and disclosure-related practitioners by documenting about CEOs’ career concerns and their voluntary disclosure decisions.