TY - JOUR A1 - Rojahn, Joachim A1 - Sülzenbrück, Sandra A1 - Lübke, Karsten T1 - Corporate debt ratios and managerial personality traits: A content analysis of chief executive officers’ speeches at annual general meetings JF - Corporate Ownership & Control N2 - This study contributes to the literature by analysing the joint association of managerial overconfidence, certainty, narcissism, and the Big Five personality traits with debt ratios in the institutional setting of the German two-tier system. Moreover, it provides insights into how corporate governance quality moderates the effects of personality. The analysis relied on the chief executive officers’ (CEOs’) speeches at annual general meetings (AGMs) that were voluntarily disseminated, a novel data source. Managers’ personality traits were measured using software-aided content analysis, and their impact on the debt ratio was analysed using panel regressions. Consistent with previous studies, the debt ratios of German issuers are significantly and positively related to the proxies of managerial certainty and narcissism. However, their model inclusion contributes only marginally to explanatory power. Conversely, the coefficients of the proxies for the Big Five personality traits remained statistically non-significant. Moreover, a significantly negative relationship between debt ratios and the interaction term between a proxy for corporate governance quality and managerial certainty is observed that corresponds to the risk-mitigating impact of corporate governance. KW - Managerial Personality Traits KW - Debt Ratio KW - German Issuers KW - Content Analysis KW - CEO Speeches KW - Annual General Meetings Y1 - 2025 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:hbz:1010-opus4-47177 SN - 1727-9232 VL - 2025 IS - 22 (1) SP - 92 EP - 102 PB - Virtus Interpress ER -