1. Topic: Busy Directors and Stock Price Synchronicity

2. Lecturer: Chen Yunseng, associate professor of school of account in CUFE, PhD in Management of Tsinghua University, and visiting scholar in Washington University in St. Louis and Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research fields include corporate finance, accounting and capital market. He has published many papers in journals like China Accounting and Finance Review, China Journal of Accounting Research, China Journal of Accounting Studies, Economic Research Journal, Management World, Accounting Research, Journal of Financial Research. He chaired two national Natural Science Foundations of China, Ministry of Education and a number of issues of Ministry of Education. He won the Henry Fok Education Foundation Award for Young Teachers prize, Beijing outstanding achievement prize Philosophy and Social Sciences, the Ministry of Finance China Accounting Society Excellent Paper Award, Yang Jiwan fund excellent monograph award academic awards.

3. Time: April 21st (Thursday) 2016, 13:00-14:00

4. Place: Room 913, Main Building

5. Host: Huang Zhigang, Associate Professor of School of Finance, CUFE.

Abstract: We find that the occurrence, scope and busyness of busy directors can significantly increase firms’ stock price synchronicity with the market using the data of Chinese publicly listed firms. These effects are more pronounced when busy directors are non-independent and more experienced. Busy directors can increase stock price synchronicity by serving as conduits for information sharing and transferring across firms, rather than by reducing monitoring leading to lower firm-specific information. These results are robust after addressing the endogeneity issues with the dynamic panel GMM estimation and the two-stage estimation with the instrument variable. These findings highlight the importance of corporate leaders’ human capital factors on firms’ systematic risk.