CEO Green Experience and Institutional Investors Site Visits: Evidence from China

This research explores how CEO green experience influences the institutional investors’ site visits. Using the unique setting o f China, this study explores the relationship between CEO green experience and institutional investors’ site visits. The findings reveal a significant positive association between CEO green experience and several factors: the likelihood of institutional investors’ site visits, the frequency of site visits, and the number of institutions participating in site visits. Furthermore, this positive association is particularly pronounced in non-pollution focused firms. This finding suggests that institutional investors consider CEO green experience in industries that are less sensitive to environmental issues as a risk factor, which leads institutional investors to increase their monitoring through more frequent site visits. However, this positive association is not significant for state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and firms with CEO duality, yet significant for firms located in the eastern regions, where social capital is relatively high. Further endogeneity-related analyses, including propensity score matching (PSM), entropy balancing, and the two-stage least squares (2SLS) approach, reinforce these major findings. This study enriches the existing literature by identifying CEO green experience as a potential driver of increased institutional investors’ site visits.