The Wealth Effects Of Managerial Turnover: Implications For The Spanish Corporate Governance System

Abstract

Managerial succession decisions constitute crucial events for the company, as they can generate important organizational changes that affect the shareholders wealth, and at the same time, entail important conflicts of interests between the managers and the shareholders. Our study of the market reactions to managerial turnover announcements in the Spanish market, reveal that these decisions have a positive effect on the shareholders wealth. These wealth effects are especially intense in the case of outsider successions and when the company preturnover performance has been poor. These findings suggest that managerial turnover is a restructuring decision that is most welcome under conditions of low performance. These results are reinforced by the existence of a negative relationship between the turnover wealth effects and the firm's preturnover performance. Our results also have implications regarding the effectiveness of the Spanish corporate governance system, suggesting that the Board's outsiders and the institutional shareholders play a major monitoring role in the managerial succession processes. The Board outsiders and the institutional shareholders influence the succession process protecting the shareholders interests against particular professional interests of the managers. We have also found evidences of the existence of entrenchment effects linked to managerial stock ownership. Finally, consistently with our event study results, we have found evidences of a positive effect of outside succession on the market's reaction to managerial turnover, in the case of a poor presuccession performance context. We have obtained no evidence about any effect from outside succession in good performing companies or inside succession in any company independently of its previous performance.