| Market pricing mechanism is the core mechanism to realize the effective allocation of resources,and market pricing efficiency is an important embodiment of the ability of capital market to serve the real economy.In complex market transactions,the buyer and seller are both subject to limited knowledge and information,so it is difficult for them to make a reasonable price for the transaction objects,which leads to the demand for professional asset appraisal services.In China’s economic system dominated by the public ownership economy,asset appraisal originates from the transaction of state-owned assets’ property rights and assumes the function of protecting the rights and interests of state-owned assets.In the past 30 years,China has continuously promoted the market-oriented economic system reform,and the asset appraisal industry has developed vigorously along with it.Its service scope has gradually expanded to all kinds of ownership economies,and it has become an indispensable value discovery agent in the capital market.However,with the rapid development of China’s asset appraisal industry,there are also some problems,among which the most closely related to the capital market is the low independence of the appraiser.On the one hand,in the fierce industrial competition,many small and medium-sized appraisal institutions give up their independence in order to seize resources,and even adopt inappropriate competitive means to increase business income.On the other hand,the laws and regulations of asset appraisal industry still need to be improved,and China’s capital market is still immature in all aspects and investor protection is weak,which leads to the unrestricted behavior of appraisers,thus causing the serious moral hazard problem in the asset appraisal industry.Asset appraisal has the important function of providing value scale for the market transaction,which can reduce the information asymmetry and improve the transaction efficiency.However,illegal appraisal behavior leads to biased valuation,which is unable to reflect the real value of assets and makes the appraisal fail to effectively play the due role.Therefore,it is of great theoretical and practical significance to study the behavior of the asset appraiser and the influencing factors of the appraisal bias.Foreign research on the factor affecting appraisal bias mainly focuses on the appraisal procedure and the customer influence.Domestic research on asset appraisal started relatively late,and mainly discusses the causes of appraisal bias from the perspectives of appraisal theory and method,appraisal manipulation of major shareholders,and reputation of appraisal institutions.Logically,there are some similarities between domestic and foreign researches,that is,the appraisal bias is not only influenced by the procedure(evaluation method,etc.),but also depends on the appraisal independence(customer pressure,appraisal manipulation,appraisal institutions’ reputation,etc.).However,both domestic and foreign researches ignore the characteristics of the asset appraiser.This paper attempts to continue the logic of the existing literature and examine the relationship between the characteristics of asset appraisers and appraisal bias.After the above studying,this paper extends the logical thinking to the consequences of appraisal bias,by examining the association between appraisal bias and stock price crash risk.The core issues of this paper include four aspects: First,women have different gender characteristics from men and play a unique role in the capital market.But women often face a "glass ceiling" that prevents them from moving up the career ladder.Women make up only about a quarter of appraisers at partner level in the asset appraisal industry.Is it because women are less competent appraisers,or is there a "glass ceiling" holding women back? In order to address this problem,this paper investigates the relationship between the gender composition of appraisers and appraisal bias by combining the studies on gender differences and gender diversity.Secondly,professional education is an important way for individuals to shape knowledge system and form cognitive mode.Compared with finance and economics professions,science and engineering professions tend to have stronger technological innovation orientation.Under the background of China’s innovation-driven development strategy,the appraisal of high-tech enterprises has become a major difficulty.Since asset appraisers of science and engineering professions have advantages in technical knowledge,are they more competent in high-tech enterprises appraisal? In order to study this problem,this paper investigates the relationship between the professional composition of appraisers and evaluation bias based on the difference between the professions of science and finance,and makes a subgroup analysis of high-tech and non-high-tech enterprises respectively.Third,market intermediaries accumulate experience and improve service quality through "learning by doing",which is the key to their long-term development.However,in practice,the experience of the intermediary agents is not completely positively correlated with their service quality.Agents’ exerting the experience-learning effect is related to their motivation to provide high-quality services,among which the independence is the most important.In the case of low independence,agents have no motivation to use experience to provide high quality services,and their behavior will deviate from the expectation of "learning by doing" theory.Then how is the relationship between the appraiser’s practice experience and the quality of appraisal results? Is it affected by the appraiser’s independence motivation? In order to study this problem,this paper examine the relationship between appraisers’ experience and appraisal bias in combination with the related research of cognitive psychology.The above three questions are divided by the relationship between the characteristics of asset appraisers and appraisal deviations,focusing on the causes of appraisal deviations.Further,this paper extends the logical chain to evaluate the consequences of appraisal bias.In recent years,the phenomenon of high premium mergers and acquisitions causing the violent crash of individual stocks and stock prices frequently occurs,behind which there is often the problem of overvaluation of trading assets.The evaluation manipulation and the evaluation deviation caused by it aggravate the information asymmetry of M&A,which can facilitate the major shareholders to seek personal gains and conceal negative information.Then,does the evaluation deviation increase the risk of stock price crash? Based on information asymmetry and agency theory,this paper examines the relationship between valuation bias and stock price crash risk.The empirical results of this paper are as follows:1.When there is at least one female appraiser in the group,the appraisal quality is higher,and the mixed-gender group has the highest appraisal quality,indicating the positive effect of female appraiser on appraisal quality.The follow-up analysis shows that the improvement of appraisal quality by female appraiser is mainly due to the suppression of positive appraisal bias.Further research finds that the relative qualification of female appraiser in the mixed-gender group positively affects the appraisal quality,suggesting that seniority culture exists in the appraisal group.In addition,the group gender composition and the appraisal quality are more strongly correlated when the task complexity is higher,but not correlated when there is more serious gender discrimination.2.The appraisers with science and engineering background have lower appraisal bias of high-tech enterprises,and the appraiser teams including both science and engineering and finance background can reduce the appraisal bias of both high-tech and non-high-tech enterprises,and the above effect is mainly to reduce the positive bias.There is little evidence in support of the appraiser independence and risk aversion as alternative explanations,suggesting that professional competence may be the main mechanism.Further analysis shows that the relatively high qualification of appraisers with science and technology background can enhance their effect on appraisal bias,suggesting that there is a certain phenomenon of "seniority" in the group of appraisers.However,the higher degree does not make the same sense.3.The experience learning effect exists among appraisers,whose practice experience is significantly negative correlated with appraisal bias,and this effect is more pronounced on the appraisers with higher experience in the team.The empirical results also shows that appraisers’ experience has a stronger effect on the positive evaluation bias.More importantly,the independent motivation of appraisers affect their willingness to exploit experience to improve appraisal quality.Specifically,when the appraiser belongs to an institution which has higher reputation,or is not in the same region as the client firm,the negative association between the appraisal experience and the appraisal bias becomes more pronounced.The association is also enhanced when the client firm is a non-state-owned enterprise,the proportion of intangible assets in the transaction assets is relatively high,or the accounting information quality of the transaction assets is low.4.Appraisal bias is significantly positively associated with the stock price crash risk,and this association is less pronounced when the appraisal institution has a high reputation,suggesting that the appraisal bias conceals bad news within the firm and increases the stock price crash risk,while appraisal institutions with high reputation mitigates this effect.Moreover,we also find that the impact of appraisal bias on stock price crash risk is less pronounced in firms with a check-and-balance ownership structure,suggesting that the bad news concealed by appraisal bias emerges from the information manipulation of large controlling shareholders,which could be constrained by effective internal governance.Analysts coverage and institutional investors shareholding mitigate the above impact as well,suggesting that diversified capital market intermediaries improve the market information environment and are important external force to restrain asset appraisal manipulation.Here are some theoretical contributions of this paper.Firstly,this paper enriches the research on asset appraisal,makes a useful supplement to existing research from the perspective of appraiser characteristics.This paper also investigates the association between appraisal bias and stock price crash risk,which deepens the cognition of the economic consequences of asset appraisal,and extends and confirms the research on appraisal manipulation.Secondly,this paper enriches the research on the intermediary characteristics and team characteristics of capital market,provides empirical evidence from Chinese asset appraisers for the research on the characteristics of market intermediary teams.Thirdly,this paper investigates the relationship between the appraisal bias and the risk of stock price crash,which further enriches the relevant research on the factors of stock price crash risk.Fourthly,this paper focuses on the assets appraisal in M&A,investigates the source of the appraisal bias and its economic consequences,which enriches the research of M&A from the perspective of asset appraisal.This paper also has certain practical significance.Firstly,this paper study the sources of the asset appraisal bias from the perspective of asset appraiser characteristics,which can make the industry regulatory authorities pay more attention to the appraiser-specific factors,thus providing enlightenment for the asset appraisal industry to further improve the personnel training and selection mechanism.Secondly,while studying the relationship between asset appraiser’s characteristics and appraisal bias,this paper also studies the influence of social and humanistic factors such as "seniority" phenomenon and gender discrimination,which can shed lights on the personnel management of asset appraisal industry.Thirdly,this paper finds that asset appraisal bias is significantly positively correlated with the stock price crash risk,which can make regulators and investors realize the importance of asset appraisal information,provide theoretical basis for improving the institutional norms of asset valuation industry,and provide a new perspective for preventing financial risks. |
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