CFO credentials, stock market signaling, and firm performance

PurposeThis paper examines how “strategic” chief financial officers (CFOs) with an elite MBA (i.e. elite CFOs) influence (1) stock market reaction to CFO hiring announcements (ex ante measure) and (2) post-hiring firm performance (ex-post measure).Design/methodology/approachThis paper utilizes a comprehensive, proprietary database with information about the educational qualifications and prior professional experience of 1,340 CFOs hired during the period 1994–2014. For each CFO, the authors hand-collected data on the CFO's prior experience as well as CFO's educational profile. The authors also identified the date of CFO hiring from financial press articles. To evaluate performance, the authors consider two different, yet complementary performance measures: (1) the stock market reaction, a priori measure and (2) a traditional measure of performance, which is a post-facto metric related to firm performance.FindingsThe results show that hiring CFOs with scarce and strategic human capital elicits a positive market response and leads to significant improvement in firm performance. Further, firms with greater managerial discretion benefit more from hiring elite CFOs. The results hold after controlling for chief executive officer (CEO), CFO, top managment team (TMT), and board characteristics.Originality/valueThis study shows converging and mutually consistent results about what specific types of CFO human capital create firm value and, more importantly, show that such value-creation is only in the case of small firms and high growth firms. The study also advances the stream of literature that contrasts the relative benefits of specialist versus generalist qualifications.