Impact of Business Strategy on Stock Price Crash Risk: Role of Overvalued Equity

Abstract

The objective of the current study is to investigate the impact of business strategies on the future crash risk of stock prices by considering the role of overvalued equity. This relationship is checked by taking non-financial firms from Pakistan Stock Exchange from 2008-2016. To evaluate the business strategy, composite strategy score is used which considers the firm's development and research costs to look for new products, sales ratio to determine the firm’s capacity to manufacture the product efficiently, standard deviation of employees, sales growth, marketing expense to sales ratio to locate the firms’ emphasis on marketing, and intensity of assets expenditures to capture the firms’ emphasis on production. Market to book decomposition method is used to calculate the equity overvaluation whereas the negative conditional skewness is used as a measure of crash risk. Random and fixed effect panel regression models are used to estimate the results. The results of the present study indicate that firms pursuing innovative strategies have a higher probability to face crash price risk. Outcomes of the study also confirm that such strategies also increase the likelihood of equity overvaluation which increases the risk of stock price crash in the future. The results of the current study are helpful for the investors in allocating the assets cautiously among companies with diverse strategies.