Are CEOs Born Leaders? Lessons from Traits of a Million Individuals

Matti Keloharju () and Samuli Knüpfer
Additional contact information
Matti Keloharju: Aalto University, Postal: and Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN), Stockholm, https://www.aalto.fi/en/department-of-finance/matti-keloharju

No 1024, Working Paper Series from Research Institute of Industrial Economics

Abstract: Our study combines a near-exhaustive sample of CEOs of Swedish companies with data on their cognitive and non-cognitive ability and height at age 18. Although CEOs, and large-company CEOs in particular, have better traits than the population on average, they are neither exceptional in any of the traits nor their combination. Large-company CEOs belong to the top 5% of the population in their traits, but to top 0.2% in pay. The mismatch between the moderately high trait values and the exceptionally high pay explains why less than a quarter of the CEO pay premium over the population can be attributed to the traits.

Keywords: CEO; Cognitive ability; Non-cognitive ability; Height; Compensation; Firm size (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G30 J24 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 56 pages
Date: 2014-06-03, Revised 2015-04-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-lab and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ifn.se/wfiles/wp/wp1024.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Are CEOs born leaders? Lessons from traits of a million individuals (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:iuiwop:1024

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Research Institute of Industrial Economics Research Institute of Industrial Economics, Box 55665, SE-102 15 Stockholm, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Elisabeth Gustafsson ().