A Research On The Relationship Between Managers' Characteristics And Cost Stickiness Of Manufacture Listed Companies

To manufacture enterprises, cost is one of the focuses in their daily management work, and cost control is particularly crucial to those execute Low-cost Strategy. Traditional Cost behavior theory holds that cost and sales is of symmetric linear relationship, so the cost variance rate has nothing to do with the sales decline/rise. While, afterwards, researches carried out by many scholars found that cost fluctuation is not linear and symmetrical to sales change, but represent nonlinear and asymmetric in different sales direction, i.e. cost marginal increase rate is larger than marginal decrease rate with an equivalent sales rise, which name as Cost Stickiness. In recent years, a large number of researches related to cost stickiness, have been conducted, such as the study of the Existence, Motivation, influential factor, etc. but few targeted from the management perspective and systematically study how the management specialty impacts on cost stickiness in a way of empirical research.This thesis collects the statistics of 880 Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed manufacturing companies from 2009 to 2013 as study sample. From management perspective, and first analyzes the management from 4 aspects, including self-interest motivation, capability of obtaining information, incentive level and Board restriction, among them, the salary and shareholding ratio, independent directors ratio and the roles of chairman & CEO are included, altogether 6 variables. The basic method adopted in the thesis is to combine the theoretical analyses with the demonstration proof-test. On the basis of theoretical analyses, there propose 7 hypotheses, first preprocess the data in excel, and then using SPSS for descriptive analysis and regression test.The empirical studies indicate that:1). Cost stickiness exists in the listed manufacture company of China as a whole.2). Cost stickiness enhances with the increasing of managers self-interest behavior motivation.3).Cost stickiness abates when manager is more capable of getting information with the expanding of time span. 4). Incentive measures reduce cost stickiness which is lower when getting more earnings and stock ownership incentive.5). Board restrictions have a reverse effect on cost stickiness, i.e. the higher the degree of restriction, the lower the cost stickiness becomes and vice versa. In the end, this thesis proposes several advices on how to control cost stickiness, based on results of theoretical analysis and empirical test.