ABSTRACT

Corporate credit ratings (CRs) are closely related to companies’ cost of debt financing. Recent research has drawn wide attention to how nonfinancial as well as financial factors may affect ratings. By manually collecting information about the profiles of chief financial officers (CFOs) of US companies, we examine the effect of CFOs’ accounting expertise on corporate CRs. The results show that firms with accounting expert CFOs are more likely to receive higher CRs and that the effect of CFOs’ accounting expertise on the ratings is more pronounced for firms with higher default risk, suggesting that the accounting expertise of CFOs may be an important factor that affects CRs. Moreover, we find a dynamic relation between accounting expert CFOs and CRs such that a downgrade in a firm’s CR in a prior year affects the subsequent selection of an accounting expert CFO.

摘要

企业信用评级（CR）与企业的债务融资成本密切相关。最近的研究引起了人们对非金融和金融因素如何影响评级的广泛关注。通过手动收集有关美国公司首席财务官 (CFO) 档案的信息，我们检验了 CFO 的会计专业知识对公司 CR 的影响。结果表明，拥有会计专家 CFO 的公司更有可能获得更高的 CR，而对于违约风险较高的公司，CFO 的会计专业知识对评级的影响更为明显，这表明 CFO 的会计专业知识可能是一个重要因素这会影响 CR。而且，