Research On The Influence Of CFO Gender Difference On Financial Decision-making Of Listed Companies

As an indispensable part of company operation,financial decision-making plays a vital role in the process of value creation.Scientific and reasonable financial decision can promote the long-term development and value of the company,conversely,it will hinder the company's development and reduce the company's value.The research of foreign scholars on financial decision-making in the1950 s.The capital structure theory,investment theory,dividend policy theory help people have a deeper understanding of financial decision,and provide theoretical guidance on how to make financial decision.However,the traditional financial theory still regards the behavior subject as completely rational.It believes that the behavior subject can process the information comprehensively,and makes an unbiased estimate of the future.It neglects the influence of individual's risk preference and cognitive bias on financial decision-making.Therefore,it can not provide a reasonable explanation for the financial decision behavior which is contrary to the traditional theory in the capital market.As a result,people begin to question the rational economic man hypothesis of traditional financial theory,and gradually shifted the perspective to the Upper Echelons Theory and Behavioral financial Theory.With the Upper Echelons Theory raise up,domestic and foreign scholars began to study corporate financial decision-making behavior from the perspective of executives' personal characteristics,such as executive overconfidence,executive background characteristics and executive compensation.However,only few scholars pay attention to the gender characteristics of executives' personal characteristics,especially to the top management of the company's financial activities—CFO.The development of behavioral finance has led scholars to realize that there are some certain factors that are imperceptible to consciousness,which can affect the managers' behavior,and gender difference is one of them.The traits of women,such as conservatism,caution(risk aversion)and not easy to overconfidence,make them significantly different from men in decision-making when they are senior executives.Therefore,this paper takes the gender difference as the perspective,selects the manufacturing listed company as the research sample,and studies the influence of CFO gender difference on the company's financial decision-making.Firstly,this paper defines the scope of the CFO and financial decisions.Then,on the basis of comprehensively reviewing the basic theory of financial decision-making,upper echelons theory,behavioral finance theory and the theory of overconfidence,the paper summarizes and reviews the relevant literature on gender difference and corporate financial decision-making,it lays a theoretical foundation for the subsequent empirical research.Secondly,this paper takes 2014-2016 A-share manufacturing listed companies of Shanghai and Shenzhen stock market as research samples,then puts forward four research hypotheses and research design respectively from the influence of CFO gender differences on financing decision-making,investment decision-making and dividend distribution,and it conducts the empirical analysis by utilizing descriptive statistics,correlation analysis,regression analysis and robustness test.Through empirical analysis,the following conclusions are drawn: in terms of financing decision-making,the gender of the sample company is significantly negatively correlated with the asset-liability ratio,and is positively correlated with the long-term debt ratio.That is to say,the gender differences makes the company with female CFO more conservative in corporate debt policies and tends to finance long-term debt.In terms of investment decisions,the gender of the sample company is significantly negatively correlated with the level of investment expenditure.That is to say,the gender difference makes the company with the female CFO has small investment.In terms of dividend distribution decision,the correlation between CFO gender and dividend payout ratio is not significant,that is to say,the company dividend distribution decision is not influenced by the gender of CFO.Finally,based on the empirical results,this paper makes a research summary and puts forward relevant suggestions to help the company avoid the negative impact of the manager gender difference and improve the rationality of financial decision-making.