Executives’F Amine Experience, Risk Aversion And Food Safety Violations

Food safety has always been an important issue concerned by all sectors of society and it related to national economy and people’s livelihood.However,in recent years,the food safety problem has become more and more serious,they not only affecting people’s health,but also affecting the quality of economic development,so the research on food safety is of great significance.Many studies have focused on industry factors,but there are still some gaps in the impact of managers’ personal characteristics,especially in their early experiences.Psychological studies have shown that early experiences alter an individual’s psychological cognition,which in turn influences their subsequent behavior and decision-making.The great famine of 19591961 affected most parts of the country in China.During this period,the grain production decreased greatly,which greatly affected the life of people.Based on this,this paper takes the great famine in China as an exogenous shock and applies the Branding Theory and Upper Echelons Theory to explore the impact of risk aversion caused by early famine experience of senior executives on food safety violations.Specifically,this paper attempts to answer the following questions:(1)Does executive famine experience affect corporate violations?How does exposure to famine at different ages and the severity of famine affect management behavior?(2)Through which mechanism does executive famine experience affect corporate violations?(3)Whether there are differences in the impact of executives’ famine experience on corporate violations under different management background,internal and external governance levels,macro policy backgrounds,and cultural backgrounds.In view of the above problems,this paper establishes an analysis chain of "the Great Famine experience of senior executives--Risk aversion--Food safety violations of listed companies".The Great Famine of 1959-1961 in China provides a natural experiment.This paper considers the degree of famine in the hometown of senior executives as exogenous shock to investigate the influence of childhood famine experience and the degree of famine in hometown on risk aversion,as well as the difference of food safety violations caused by this mechanism.The results of the study found that for every 10%increase in executive hunger,a company’s food safety violations decreased by 4.36%.The conclusion is still valid after using grain cultivation suitability and per capita grain cultivation area as instrumental variables to solve the endogeneity problem.At the same time,executive risk aversion is more pronounced aversion is stronger when macro policy is unstable and in regions where individualism is prevalent.This paper adopts famine degree to measure executive risk aversion and explore its impact on corporate food safety violations,which not only inherits and extends the earlier research experience of existing executives,but also enriches the existing research on food safety violations from the dimension of risk aversion,which has important practical significance.