CEO Turnover and Relative Performance Evaluation

Dirk Jenter and Fadi Kanaan

No 12068, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper examines whether CEOs are fired after bad firm performance caused by factors beyond their control. Standard economic theory predicts that corporate boards filter out exogenous industry and market shocks to firm performance when deciding on CEO retention. Using a new hand-collected sample of 1,590 CEO turnovers from 1993 to 2001, we document that CEOs are significantly more likely to be dismissed from their jobs after bad industry and bad market performance. A decline in the industry component of firm performance from its 75th to its 25th percentile increases the probability of a forced CEO turnover by approximately 50 percent. This finding is robust to controls for firm-specific performance. The result is at odds with the prior empirical literature which showed that corporate boards filter exogenous shocks from CEO dismissal decisions in samples from the 1970s and 1980s. Our findings suggest that the standard CEO turnover model is too simple to capture the empirical relation between performance and forced CEO turnovers, and we evaluate several extensions to the standard model.

JEL-codes: D20 D23 G30 G34 M51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec and nep-fin
Note: CF LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (68)

Published as Dirk Jenter & Fadi Kanaan, 2015. "CEO Turnover and Relative Performance Evaluation," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 70(5), pages 2155-2184, October.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w12068.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: CEO Turnover and Relative Performance Evaluation (2015)
Working Paper: CEO turnover and relative performance evaluation (2015)
Working Paper: CEO Turnover and Relative Performance Evaluation (2008)
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:nbr:nberwo:12068

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w12068

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().