Does the market for corporate control influence executive risk-taking incentives? Evidence from takeover vulnerability

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the role of the market for corporate control as an external governance mechanism and its effect on executive risk-taking incentives. Managers tend to be risk-averse as they are more exposed to idiosyncratic risk, resulting in sub-optimal risk-taking that does not maximize shareholders’ wealth. The takeover market alleviates this problem, inducing managers to take more risk. Therefore, risk-taking incentives inside the firm are less powerful when the outside takeover market is more active. Design/methodology/approach: Exploiting a novel measure of takeover vulnerability recently constructed by Cain et al. (2017), the authors explore how takeover vulnerability influences executive risk-taking incentives. Using a large sample of US firms, the authors use fixed-effects regressions, propensity score matching and instrumental variable analysis. Findings: Consistent with this study’s hypothesis, a more active takeover market results in less powerful risk-taking incentives. Specifically, a rise in takeover vulnerability by one standard deviation diminishes executive risk-taking incentives by 22.39%, which is an economically meaningful magnitude. Originality/value: To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to explore the effect of the takeover market on managerial risk-taking incentives, using a novel measure of takeover susceptibility. The authors’ measure of takeover vulnerability is considerably less susceptible to endogeneity, enabling the authors to draw causal inferences with more confidence.