CFO Serving Concurrently As Board Secretary And The Quality Of Managerial Earnings Forecasts

High-quality managerial earnings forecasts can timely transmit important information about the company’s business prospects to the outside market,which is of great significance for improving the efficiency of the capital market.Therefore,how to optimize the quality of managerial earnings forecasts is an important issue for capital market investors and regulators.The existing literature believes that the characteristics of the information discloser will affect the quality of information disclosure.In view of this,considering that more and more CFOs play the dual roles of the company’s financial information producer and capital market communication at the same time,this paper attempts to examine the impact of CFO concurrently serving as board secretary on the quality of managerial earnings forecasts.This paper selects A-share listed companies in China as research samples,and empirically tests the impact of CFO concurrently serving as board secretary on the quality of managerial earnings forecasts.The results show that the CFO concurrently serving as the company’s board secretary can significantly reduce the deviation of the company’s managerial earnings forecast.In order to alleviate the endogenous problem,this paper employs the methods of propensity score matching and Heckman test,and finds that the above results are robust.This shows that the CFO’s concurrent role as the board secretary can optimize information communication,which is conducive to their comprehensive and in-depth grasp of the company’s operating performance information,so as to improve the quality of performance forecast by virtue of information advantages.Further research finds that when the risk of corporate performance volatility is high,or the quality of analysts’ earnings forecasts is poor,or the experience of board secretaries is more abundant,the effect of CFO concurrently serving as board secretary on the quality of managerial earnings forecasts is more significant.Finally,we also find that the CFO concurrently serving as the board secretary can significantly improve the market value of the company,and when the quality of managerial earnings forecasts is high,the CFO concurrently serving as the board secretary can significantly reduce the delay of the company’s stock price,thereby improving the information efficiency of the capital market.The results of this paper can help to improve the understanding of CFO concurrently serving as board secretary,and at the same time have some implications for improving the quality of performance forecast disclosure and optimizing the information environment of Chinese capital market.