Managerial Myopia and Investment Behavior -- Based on Text Mining and Machine Learning Technology

This paper investigates the effects of managerial myopia on investment behaviors in China. We construct a new indicator to measure managerial myopia by text analysis and machine learning methods based on the management discussion and analysis (MD&A) in A-share listed company's annual reports during 2007-2016. Our results indicate that the higher frequency of short-horizon vocabulary represents the higher degree of managerial myopia, which will decrease the company's R&D investment, the number of patents and inventions. Besides, the impact of managerial myopia on R&D investments is more concentrated on firms with a high degree of environmental uncertainty and high age of managers. And the relationship between managerial myopia and R&D investment is stronger among firms with low analyst coverage. Furthermore, we find that managerial myopia will also reduce the company's advertising expense and increase the real earnings management activity