City Research Online

Abstract

Integrating signaling research with the institutional perspective on capital markets we argue that, in conditions of radical technological change, investor perceptions about firm value are enhanced by the CEO’s orientation towards digital technologies that exceeds the firm’s industry peers. This base relationship is moderated by board characteristics, so that the board members’ digital expertise and knowledge diversity enhance the effect of the CEO’s relative digital technology orientation on firm value. Furthermore, the monitoring power of independent board members that do not have digital expertise negatively moderates our baseline hypothesis, whereas board monitoring exerted by independent board members with digital expertise has a positive moderating effect. To test our theory, we use advanced Natural Language Processing techniques to develop the CEO’s relative digital technology orientation construct combined with a unique, hand-collected, set of measures associated with board members’ digital expertise and knowledge diversity in a sample of S&P 500 companies. Our paper offers novel insights on how technology-related signals associated with the CEO’s communications to shareholders interact with board characteristics in determining investor perceptions of the firm’s value in conditions of high technological uncertainty.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2023. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). Request permissions for this article.
Publisher Keywords:	corporate governance, boards of directors, technology strategy, institutional theory (sociology)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HB Economic Theory H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor > HD28 Management. Industrial Management
Departments:	Bayes Business School > Management
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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