In recent years, government departments have continued to launch reform measures to deepen the internal employment system of SOEs. The relevant institutions have gradually made it clear that SOEs can allow professional executives to step smoothly and effectively into the management talent teams through market-based selection and employment, tenure-based management, contractual management and other sessions. Then, whether and in what ways the employment of professional executives in SOEs can have a positive effect cannot be overlooked for understanding the path and economic consequences of personnel system reform in SOEs. This paper chooses to research this issue from the perspective of corporate information quality. Specifically, it measures the information quality of SOEs in terms of the error and divergence of analyst forecasts, defines whether the CEO and the CFO are professional executives in terms of their work experience, selects state-owned listed companies as a sample, and constructs a staggered DID model. Then, the study finds that analysts have significantly lower error and divergence in their forecasts for the SOE when the CEO or the CFO employed is a professional executive. So, professional executives can improve the information quality of SOEs. This finding also holds after considering endogeneity such as mixed-ownership reform and various robust tests. The influence mechanism test shows that professional executives improve analyst forecast accuracy by improving both the efficiency of communication between SOEs and external information intermediaries and the quality of internal controls. Cross-section variance analyses show that professional executives influence analyst forecast accuracy in both central and local SOEs, but the phenomenon that professional executives can improve analyst forecast accuracy is more evident in samples with higher fund holdings, located in provinces with a higher degree of marketization or established earlier.

The possible contributions of this paper are as follows: First, it is the first attempt to quantify whether a SOE employs professional executives in a market-based format, which provides reference for subsequent studies. This paper also enriches the literature in the field of economic consequences of the employment of professional executives in SOEs. Second, information quality plays an important role in influencing the business behavior of enterprises. However, the information transparency of SOEs is poorer compared to that of private enterprises. This paper explores effective ways that can improve the information quality of SOEs, which provides practical implications for the reform of SOEs. Third, most executives in SOEs are not typical professional executives who possess both economic and public person characteristics. The findings provide favorable evidence that the professional executive institution can operate effectively in SOEs, which helps the government evaluate more comprehensively the effectiveness of promoting the personnel system reform in SOEs.