Financial wealth, socioemotional wealth, and founder exits: an empirical examination of Chinese IPOs

Initial public offerings (IPOs) are typically viewed as the peak of entrepreneurial success, providing founder-CEOs a chance to profitably exit. Founder-CEOs, however, are often motivated by non-financial considerations in addition to the desire to amass wealth. According to the behavioral agency model, the founder-CEOs’ framing of gains vs. losses of their wealth creation at IPO determines their risk aversion vs. risk taking behaviors. In addition, the behavioral agency model argues that founder-CEOs with a great deal of socioemotional wealth fear losing that wealth. This fear will attenuate their aversion to losing financial wealth. To test our model, we collected a sample of 130 entrepre…