Managerial ability has been proven to play an important determinant in tax avoidance, earnings quality, goodwill impairment, and other corporate policies. However, the relationship between investment opportunity and managerial ability has remained unclear for a long time, likely due to difficulty in measurement and other data limitations. This study focuses on how superior managerial ability affects investment opportunity for the following two reasons. First, as a crucial role in corporate finance, investment opportunity impacts a firm’s capital structure, dividend policy, and future growth (Smith and Watts (1992), Kallapur and Trombley (1999)). Second, because investment opportunity is unobservable by outsiders, it would be helpful if we could link investment opportunity to other firm characteristics and managerial ability. We argue that superior managers can understand industrial trends better, predict product demand more accurately, and invest in more value-creating projects, therefore associating themselves with better investment opportunity. Although the hypothesis we propose is somehow intuitive, a recent study in behavior corporate finance also shows that managers with a good reputation and compensation package may engage in more risk-averse and time preference projects that can harm investment opportunities (Graham, Campbell, and Manju (2013)). Moreover, we aim to find out whether the relation between managerial ability and investment opportunity varies under different financial conditions and economic environments. Rather than extrapolate the ability from managers’ characteristics, education background, personality traits, and working experience, we examine the relation by adopting the newly developed measure of managerial ability introduced by Demerjian, Lev, and McVay (2012) – namely, the MAscore (henceforth, we use MA-score to represent managerial ability). This measure follows a two-step procedure composed of data envelopment analysis and multivariate regression to quantify managers’ ef- ficiency in generating revenue. Prior research shows that the MA-score can reflect management-specific factors more precisely through several valid tests and is thus a better measure of managerial ability. The empirical evidence strongly supports our hypothesis, because our results document a significantly positive relation between managerial ability and investment opportunity, even after we control for firm fixed effects, year fixed effects, and other control variables. The empirical results indicate that managers with superior ability are related to more outstanding investment opportunities, as expected. In addition, we conduct a subsample test to look at how managerial ability’s impact on investment opportunity operates in different fi- nancial conditions and find that the result is more pronounced for firms with a low Kaplan-Zingales Index and a high Altman Z-score. Lastly, we interact the MA-score with the HHI dummy and Recession dummy to examine theirs correlations under different industrial and economic conditions and show that superior ability can mitigate the adverse effect of industry competition and financial crisis. For robustness, we conduct many different tests. First, we adopt Tobin’s q and the capital expenditure rate as alternative proxies for investment opportunity. Second, we use another methodology, first difference, to confirm the baseline regression. Third, we select the subsample of positive MAscores to re-run analysis. Fourth, we use 2SLS with instrumental variables, system simultaneous equations model (SEM), and Granger Causality to solve the endogenous problem.1 All results are still consistent with our expectation.

چکیده

این مطالعه این امر را بررسی می کند که آیا شرکت هایی که تحت نظر مدیران برتر فعالیت می کنند، می توانند با استفاده از داده های شرکت های صنعتی آمریکا در طی سال های ۱۹۸۸ تا ۲۰۱۵ به فرصت های سرمایه گذاری مطلوبتر دست پیدا کنند یا خیر. نتایج تجربی نشان می دهد که رابطه مثبتی بین توانایی مدیریتی و فرصت سرمایه گذاری وجود دارد و همچنین این رابطه تنها در شرکت هایی که از لحاظ مالی غیر محدود هستند یا شرکت هایی که در موقعیت مالی قوی قرار دارند معنادار می باشد. در کل یافته های ما از این حمایت می کند که شرکت هایی که مدیرانی با توانایی برتر دارند می توانند به منافع اقتصادی بیشتر از طریق فرصت های سرمایه گذاری بهتر دست پیدا کنند. از طریق تحقیق ما، سیاست گذاران و سرمایه گذاران می توانند توجه بیشتری به توانایی مدیریتی بنمایند.

۱- مقدمه

توانایی مدیریتی اثبات کرده است که یک عامل تعیین کننده مهم در اجتناب از مالیات، کیفیت درآمد، و سایر سیاست های شرکت می باشد. با این حال رابطه بین فرصت سرمایه گذاری و توانایی مدیریتی برای مدت زمان زیادی نامعین مانده است که این به دلیل دشواری اندازه گیری و سایر محدودیت های داده ای می باشد. این مطالعه بر روی چگونگی تأثیرگذاری توانایی مدیران برتر بر فرصت های سرمایه گذاری به دو دلیل زیر تمرکز می کند. اولاً فرصت سرمایه گذاری بعنوان یک نقش حیاتی در امور مالی شرکت بر ساختار سرمایه ای شرکت، سیاست های سود سهام و رشد آینده تأثیر می گذارد. دوماً از آنجا که فرصت سرمایه گذاری توسط افراد خارجی قابل رویت نیست، اگر ما بتوانیم فرصت سرمایه گذاری را به سایر ویژگی های شرکت و توانایی مدیریتی مرتبط کنیم نتیجه مطلوبی خواهیم گرفت.