Female Executives And Cross-border Mergers And Acquisitions:Decision-making,Performance And Mechanism Testing

As an important form of foreign investment,most cross-border M&A are irrational decision-makings.In addition to relying on government regulations,it is also a unique discussion from the perspective of the senior management team.Based on the upper echelons theory,we studied the influence of the gender characteristics of the executive team on the cross-border M&A,and summarized three mechanisms why female executives restrain irrational cross-border M&A decisions:(1)female executives have higher moral standards and lower agency costs;(2)they have lower "overconfidence";(3)they are more risk averse.Besides,there are differences in the influence of women executives with different professional backgrounds.Specifically,executives with production and output professional backgrounds(type 1)pay more attention to the benefits and are more likely to constitute the "push",while executives with support professional backgrounds such as finance and law(type 2)are more sensitive to the risk,thus forming the "pull".In the fundamental empirical analysis,this paper adopts the related data of Chinese listed companies,through the multivariate OLS model and Logit model,and find that the female ratio in type 1 team had no significant impact,and the ratio in type 2 executive team significantly reduce the M&A decisions.In order to eliminate the influence of endogenous variable deviation,IV method and PSM method were adopted to repeat the above research,and the conclusion was still consistent.Finally,we make two extended analysis:(1)the influence on the long-term performance.The results show that the female ratio in type 2 executive team significantly higher the long-term performance,which proves that women executives to curb the excessive irrational M&A.(2)the mechanism testing of female executives on the M&A decisions.The female ratio in type 2 executive team significantly reduce the agent cost of the company and overconfidence level,but does not significantly affect appetite for risk.This difference also explains the influence of the proportion of female executives on the performance of M&A.Generally,this paper expands the empirical research on the influence of the gender of executives on cross-border M&A,and provides policy references for issues such as women's equal work and irrational cross-border M&A.