关键词: 校友关系, 复杂网络, 企业风险, 嵌入层级, 风险管理

Abstract: In the face of the pressure of the continuing international economic downturn, the business activities of enterprises have been hit by strong external shocks. The number of business failures has been high in recent years. Based on the purpose of reducing corporate risk, the research on mining the influencing factors of corporate risk has been paid more and more attention by the academia and industry.
Previous studies have shown that a corporate risk is affected by internal factors such as management characteristics and corporate governance as well as external factors such as macro policies and financial environment. However, from the perspective of management characteristics, most of the research is based on the natural attributes of executives, but little is based on the social connection attributes of CEOs. China is a country that values connections, circles and relationships. It is a typical relational society. Complex interpersonal relationships are interconnected to form a huge social network. This kind of social relationship is not only the emotional bond between people, but also the connection of interests, especially the alumni connection. Influenced by the campus culture and historical background of the same university, alumni can form a strong sense of cohesion and identity, which can bring certain resources to the enterprise and affect the operation of the enterprise. However, it is worth considering that although CEO alumni connection helps enterprises to exchange information, obtain funds and achieve stable development of enterprises, if an enterprise is hit by a risk, related CEO enterprises may also be affected by risk contagion. Therefore, it is not yet known how CEO alumni connection affects the corporate risk and the influencing mechanism.
Based on the above analysis, this paper broadens the analysis of the antecedent factors of the corporate risk. It establishes a network with CEO alumni connections as nodes through a complex network model, and deeply analyzes the topological properties of CEO alumni networks. It selects the data of China’s A-share listed companies from 2009 to 2019 as the initial research sample to explore the effect and mechanism of CEO alumni connection on the corporate risk. Since the calculation of the corporate risk measures requires a rolling standard model, the final panel sample period is from 2009 to 2017. Among them, CEO alumni connection data are manually organized, while financial data and other data mainly come from CSMAR database and WIND database. It uses the fixed effect model for regression analysis, while controlling the fixed effects of industry and year.
It is found that CEO alumni connection can significantly reduce corporate risk. After controlling the possible endogeneity problems and conducting the robustness test, the conclusions of this paper remain consistent. At the same time, through the mechanism test, it finds that CEO alumni network has the effect of “information substitution” and “capital acquisition”. At the same time, it also finds that CEO alumni network has a “hierarchy effect” in reducing corporate risk. That is, the degree of CEO’s indirect alumni connection is relatively shallow, so it does not significantly reduce the corporate risk. However, the CEO’s direct alumni connection and close alumni connection are deeply embedded, which can bring information and financial resources to enterprises, thus reducing corporate risk.
The possible contributions of this paper are mainly reflected in the following aspects: from the perspective of CEO alumni connection, a social attribute, it enriches the research content of the factors affecting corporate risk. At the same time, we explore the influencing mechanism and uncover the “black box” of CEO alumni connection to reduce corporate risk, which provides practical enlightenment for the government to strengthen the construction of formal institutions and enterprises to rationally use resources to reduce risks.

Key words: alumni network, complex network, corporate risk, embeddedness, risk management