Effects of Bad News on Stock Returns and Analysts’ Recommendations: The Influence of Executive Gender

Abstract

Although women are more conservative and more ethical than men, the proportion of female executives is still lower than that of men. Both Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) have strong influences in making corporate financial decisions. However, most of the literature focuses only on CEOs and ignores CFOs. Therefore, when bad news happens, it is possible that a female CEO/CFO can better alleviate the negative impact. We thus employ 4,405 firm-year observations over the period of 1996–2018, of which 680 are unique companies listed on the S&P1500 index, to examine how CEO and CFO gender influences stock returns and analyst recommendations. Our ordinary least squares and logistic regression results show that investors are pessimistic about companies led by female CEOs/CFOs, especially female CEOs. That is, when something bad happens, stock returns and analyst recommendations are worse for firms with female CEOs. Overall, this study is first to use stock returns to observe market reactions to firms with female CEOs/CFOs. In other words, the corporate remains unfriendly toward women, even those who are qualified as CEOs/CFOs