Purpose – This paper investigates whether managerial overconfidence is associated with firm-specific crash risk. Overconfidence leads managers to overestimate the returns of their investment projects, and misperceive negative net present value projects as value creating. They even use voluntary disclosures to convey their optimistic beliefs about the firms’ long-term prospects to the stock market. Thus, the overconfidence bias can lead to managerial bad news hoarding behavior. When bad news accumulates and crosses some tipping point, it will come out all at once, resulting in a stock price crash. Research design, data and methodology – 7,385 firm-years used for the main analysis are from the KIS Value database between 2006 and 2013. This database covers KOSPI-listed and KOSDAQ-listed firms in Korea. The proxy for overconfidence is based on excess investment in assets. A residual from the regression of total asset growth on sales growth run by industry-year is used as an independent variable. If a firm has at least one crash week during a year, it is referred to as a high crash risk firm. The dependant variable is a dummy variable that equals 1 if a firm is a high crash risk firm, and zero otherwise. After explaining the relationship between managerial overconfidence and crash risk, the total sample was divided into two sub-samples; chaebol firms and non-chaebol firms. The relation between how I overconfidence and crash risk varies with business group affiliation was investigated. Results – The results showed that managerial overconfidence is positively related to crash risk. Specifically, the coefficient of OVERC is significantly positive, supporting the prediction. The results are strong and robust in non-chaebol firms. Conclusions – The results show that firms with overconfident managers are likely to experience stock price crashes. This study is related to past literature that examines the impact of managerial overconfidence on the stock market. This study contributes to the literature by examining whether overconfidence can explain a firm’s future crashes.

• 유혜영(Assistant Professor, Department of International Business, Hansei University, Korea.) | Haeyoung Ryu