A growing body of research offers evidence that CEOs and other top executives show large and persistent person-specific heterogeneity in their management styles. Bertrand and Schoar (2003) document that such person-specific styles explain a substantial fraction of the variation in firms’ capital structures, investment decisions and organizational structures. The idea that CEOs greatly differ in...

Abstract We study whether firms that are led by chief executive officers (CEOs) with law degrees (lawyer CEOs) have different credit ratings and costs of debt from other firms. Our sample consists Standard & Poor’s 1500 1992 to 2020, 9.2% which lawyer CEOs. find these better ratings, compared On average, their cost is 10% lower than CEOs without legal backgrounds. results robust specificati...

Abstract: A reload option awards a new option for every share tendered to exercise an existing option. We use a sample of 242 firms that adopted reload provisions to investigate claims that firms use reload options to encourage early exercise and increase share ownership (incentive alignment) against the competing claim that reloads transfer wealth from shareholders to managers. We find that CE...

This paper examines the effects of female chief executive officers (CEOs) on firm performance. Using data nonfinancial listed firms in Japan, we show that only 0.8% some 42,000 firm-year observations have CEOs. There is also little evidence appoint more females as CEOs during our sample period. While stock market reacts positively to introduction a firm's first CEO, relationship between CEO gen...

This paper investigates “legacy divestitures,” the sale or spinoff of a company’s original, or “legacy” business. The central tension considered in this work is that the historical presence of a firm’s legacy business should simultaneously make that unit very interdependent with the company’s remaining operations and make the firm’s managers highly likely to take those same interdependencies fo...

Although sustainable competitive advantages in today's hypercompetitive economy call for strong management skills, the literature lacks a holistic understanding of specific capabilities chief executive officers (CEOs) utilize to drive innovation. This article derives dynamic CEO (DCCs) concept examine whether CEOs' individual-level DCCs facilitate firm-level innovation and proposes that power m...

In 1989 the Catholic Health Association, in conjunction with the University of Iowa Center for Health Services Research, surveyed chief executive officers (CEOs) of rural hospitals regarding their hospital's viability and strategic behaviors and orientations. An extensive questionnaire was sent to the CEOs of all Catholic, all other religious not-for-profit, and all investor-owned rural hospita...

We use linguistic algorithms to measure the extraversion of company executives based on their speech patterns during conference calls. We find extraverted executives earn significantly higher salaries. Extraverted CFOs are more often promoted to CEO, and extraverted CEOs are more likely to serve on outside boards. Analyzing executive transitions, we find that firms with extraverted CEOs garner ...

This study examines the role of CEOs’ pensions and deferred compensations by exploring their impacts on pricing and non-pricing contract terms of bank loans. CEO’s inside debt, defined as the sum of defined benefit pensions and deferred compensations, pays fixed amounts at periodic intervals. We find that higher inside debt holdings significantly reduce both loan rate spreads and demands for co...

The work of managers is information-intensive. Managers receive a huge amount of information from a wide range of sources and use the information to make day-to-day decisions and to formulate longerterm strategies. Yet much remains to be learned about the information behavior of managers as a distinct user group. This article reports on how top managers acquire and use information about the ext...