A Study On The Impacts Of The Top Management Teams Background Characteristics On Listed Banks Risk-Taking

The excessive bank risk-taking is considered as the origin of 2008's global financial crisis, it is worthwhile for us to reflect. Members of top management teams (TMT) of banks are the strategy makers and strategy performers in the bank management, their decision-making behaviors to some extent decide how well the bank risk-taking is. It might be noted that, TMT members wouldn't always be rational. Their decision-making behaviors are interfered by psychological deviation, like the overconfidence, confirmation bias and short-sighted, which are closely related to their background characteristics. Therefore, the background characteristics of TMT members, like their age, sex, degree of education, may have impacts on bank risk-taking. However, existed researches have paid less attention to such relationship.The study takes the upper echelon theory and the behavioral decision theory as the starting point, combining the bank loans behavioral theory, the information decision theory and the social identity theory, getting data from 16 listed banks in China during the time from 2003 to 2014, then making an empirical study on the impacts of TMT background characteristics on bank risk-taking. The results show that:(1) Both of the TMT female percentage and the heterogeneity of sex negatively relate to z-score's reciprocal. (2) The TMT average age and NPL ratio act out an inverted U shape, and the heterogeneity of age is positively related to NPL ratio. (3) The TMT average education degree negatively relates to the z-score's reciprocal and NPL ratio, but the heterogeneity of education degree neither relates to z-score's reciprocal nor NPL ratio. (4) Both of the TMT expert background and the heterogeneity of expert background negatively relate to NPL ratio. (5) Both of the TMT politic background and the heterogeneity of politic background positively relate to z-score's reciprocal, they positively relate to NPL ratio as well.The study built an analytical framework of the impacts of TMT background characteristics on bank risk-taking, which makes a new perspective to study the influential factors of bank risk-taking. And the inspiration of research results could help strategy makers of listed banks effectively build top management teams, enhance the top management teams' management capacity and improve the bank risk control quality.