Stock price crash and information environment: Do CEO gender and financial expertise matter?

This study examines the effect of stock price crash on the information environment. We further investigate the effect of female and financial expert CEOs on the stock price crash and information environment nexus. Employing one of the largest datasets to-date of Chinese A-share listed firms (i.e., over 35,000 firm-year observations), our findings are twofold. First, consistent with agency and information asymmetry perspective, we find that stock price crash deteriorates the quality of information environment. Second, consistent with resource dependence view, our findings reveal that the presence of female and financial expert CEOs mitigate the stock price crash and information environment relationship. Our findings are robust to different endogeneity tests (e.g., two-stage least squares, propensity score matching, bootstrapping, and the system generalized method of moments), alternate proxies and additional analyses. This study contributes to the literature on portfolio investment and risk management.