Young Researcher Workshop

Early-life Experience of Social Violence and CEOs’ Risk-taking Attitudes

Speaker: Cindy Shen, Predoctoral Research Fellow, Stanford Graduate School of Business

We show that early-life experience of social violence exerts a lasting influence on CEO’s risk-taking attitudes, in the context of their corporate acquisition decisions. Utilizing the Cultural Revolution as a rare social experiment, we document that, CEOs experienced higher level social violence in early-life are less likely to engage in acquisition and the impact is larger for riskier type of acquisition. Further analyses show that the early-life social violence experience takes effect by affecting people’s mental health. Given that our treatment is distinct from the events in prior studies (e.g., natural disaster or economic degression), this study enriches our understanding on the origin of managerial risk-taking incentives.

About the Workshops

The SCCEI Young Researcher Workshops are a bi-weekly series of presentations from scholars around campus who are working on issues related to China’s economy and institutions. The aim of the series is to bring together young scholars by providing a platform to present new research, get feedback, exchange ideas, and make connections. Each session features a single presenter who may present a new research plan, share results from preliminary data analyses, or do a trial run of a job talk or conference presentation. The Workshop Series is an opportunity to give and receive feedback on existing research, get to know other researchers around campus who are working on or in China, and be a testing ground for new ideas, data, and presentations.

Workshops are held every other Thursday from 1 - 2 pm. Afternoon refreshments will be provided! 

Visit the Young Researcher Workshops webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present.