Purpose

This paper aims to investigate the effect of CEO social media celebrity status on credit ratings and to determine whether potential threats on the CEO celebrity status negatively moderate the above association.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors collected tweets for 874 CEOs from 513 unique S&P 1500 firms. A panel data analysis was conducted on a panel with 4,235 observations from 2009 to 2020. We then tested the hypothesis with the ordinal logit model.

Findings

The empirical findings confirmed that CEO social media celebrity status is positively associated with corporate credit rating outcomes. Our path analyses revealed that CEOs with higher social media celebrity status have less incentive to conduct risk-taking behaviors and thus benefit credit ratings. When the rating agencies perceive potential threats to CEO celebrity status, including CEO myopia and CEO overconfidence, the association between CEO social media celebrity status and credit rating is weakened.

Practical implications

This study provides an in-depth understanding of CEO social media perception on credit ratings for firms' managers and capital market participants. Findings can help managers and firms improve their strategies for leveraging social media to release credit constraints. The debt market participants could adopt the CEO social media celebrity status and its concerned threats to setting debt contracts with an adequate price.

Originality/value

This is likely to be the first study that examines the effect of CEO social media celebrity status on credit ratings. The findings of this study also reveal that social media certificated celebrity CEOs tend to be capable of enhancing firm revenue and have lower risk-taking incentives, unlike mass media certificated celebrity CEOs.

中文翻译：

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CEO社交媒体名人地位和信用评级评估

 目的

本文旨在调查首席执行官社交媒体名人地位对信用评级的影响，并确定对首席执行官名人地位的潜在威胁是否会对上述关联产生负面影响。

设计/方法论/途径

作者收集了来自 513 家标准普尔 1500 指数公司的 874 名首席执行官的推文。对 2009 年至 2020 年 4,235 个观测值的面板进行了面板数据分析。然后，我们使用序数 Logit 模型检验了该假设。

 发现

实证研究结果证实，首席执行官社交媒体名人地位与企业信用评级结果呈正相关。我们的路径分析显示，社交媒体名人地位较高的首席执行官进行冒险行为的动力较小，从而有利于信用评级。当评级机构意识到CEO名人地位的潜在威胁（包括CEO短视和CEO过度自信）时，CEO社交媒体名人地位与信用评级之间的关联就会减弱。

 实际影响

这项研究深入了解了首席执行官社交媒体对公司经理和资本市场参与者信用评级的看法。研究结果可以帮助管理者和公司改进利用社交媒体释放信贷约束的策略。债务市场参与者可以利用首席执行官的社交媒体名人地位及其担忧的威胁来以适当的价格制定债务合同。

 原创性/价值

这可能是第一个研究首席执行官社交媒体名人地位对信用评级影响的研究。这项研究的结果还表明，与大众媒体认证的名人首席执行官不同，社交媒体认证的名人首席执行官往往能够提高公司收入，并且冒险动机较低。