Does CEO fitness matter?

Peter Limbach and Florian Sonnenburg

CFR Working Papers from University of Cologne, Centre for Financial Research (CFR)

Abstract: This study provides evidence suggesting that CEOs' physical fitness has a positive impact on firm value, consistent with the beneficial effects of fitness on, e.g., cognitive functions, stress coping and job performance. For each of the years 2001 to 2011, we define S&P 1500 CEOs as fit if they finish a marathon. CEO fitness is also associated with higher firm profitability and higher M&A announcement returns. Our identification strategy includes CEO-firm fixed effects, instrumental variables, permutation tests, random effects, and time-varying CEO, firm and industry effects. An additional analysis of sudden CEO deaths, based on a fitness measure not limited to running, confirms our results.

Keywords: CEO heterogeneity; firm value; mergers and acquisitions; physical fitness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G32 G34 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-hrm and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/123715/1/841379122.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:zbw:cfrwps:1412r3

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CFR Working Papers from University of Cologne, Centre for Financial Research (CFR) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (econstor@zbw-workspace.eu).