Study On The Impact Of Analysts’ Attention On Excess Goodwill

Merger and acquisition is an important way for enterprises to seek scale and improve competitiveness.Irrational decision-making in merger and acquisition leads to the bubble of merger and acquisition price and generates excess goodwill.Excess goodwill is the part in which the cost of merger and acquisition expenditure exceeds the synergy benefits it can bring,and the huge goodwill impairment risk hidden in it brings hidden dangers to the sustainable development of the enterprise and the stability of the capital market.Therefore,the risk hidden in excess goodwill should not be underestimated.With the rapid development of capital market,the analyst industry has made rapid development.As an important part of the external supervision,the analysts can not only provide more incremental information and reduce the information asymmetry,but also supervise the management behavior of the listed company to a certain extent,which can help to restrict the irrational merger and acquisition behavior.Therefore,it is worth discussing whether analysts can inhibit excess goodwill and how to inhibit excess goodwill.Based on this,this thesis takes A-share listed companies from 2007 to 2021 as the research sample,uses the residual obtained by goodwill expectation model to measure excess goodwill,uses the number of analysts who have published research reports on listed companies every year to measure analyst attention,and explores the mechanism of analyst attention on excess goodwill through empirical research.Firstly,this thesis studies the influence of analyst’s attention on excess goodwill,and then verifies the mediating effect of agency cost and information disclosure quality in the process of analyst’s attention on excess goodwill.In order to overcome the endogeneity problem,regression is performed after one and two periods of lag of explanatory variables,and Heckman two-stage test also performed.In addition,the robustness test was conducted by replacing the explained variables and resetting the sample interval.Finally,in a further analysis,this thesis discusses the impact of analyst concerns on excess goodwill based on the heterogeneity of property rights and audit characteristics.The results show that: firstly,analyst attention can significantly inhibit the generation of excess goodwill.Secondly,agency cost and information disclosure quality play an intermediary role in the inhibition effect of analysts’ attention on excess goodwill,that is,analysts focus on inhibiting the generation of excess goodwill by easing agency cost and improving information disclosure quality.Thirdly,further research finds that in non-state-owned enterprises and enterprises audited by the Big Four accounting firms,analysts’ inhibition of excess goodwill is more significant.Finally,based on the research conclusions,this thesis puts forward targeted suggestions.