CEO Stress, Aging, and Death

Ulrike M. Malmendier, Mark Borgschulte, Marius Guenzel and Canyao Liu

No 14933, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: We estimate the long-term effects of experiencing high levels of job demands on the mortality and aging of CEOs. The estimation exploits variation in takeover protection and industry crises. First, using hand-collected data on the dates of birth and death for 1,605 CEOs of large, publicly-listed U.S. firms, we estimate the resulting changes in mortality. The hazard estimates indicate that CEOs’ lifespan increases by two years when insulated from market discipline via anti-takeover laws, and decreases by 1.5 years in response to an industry-wide downturn. Second, we apply neural-network based machine-learning techniques to assess visible signs of aging in pictures of CEOs. We estimate that exposure to a distress shock during the Great Recession increases CEOs’ apparent age by one year over the next decade. Our findings imply significant health costs of managerial stress, also relative to known health risks.

Keywords: Managerial stress; Job demands; Life expectancy; Apparent-age estimation; Industry distress; Visual machine-learning; Corporate governance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-dem, nep-hea, nep-his and nep-hrm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP14933 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Working Paper: CEO Stress, Aging, and Death (2023)
Working Paper: CEO Stress, Aging, and Death (2021)
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:cpr:ceprdp:14933

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP14933

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().