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Posts Tagged ‘CEO’

Why Family-Firm CEOs Underperform Professional CEOs

The topic of family businesses has long been of interest around here. Stephen Dubner wrote about it a few months ago, and our “Church of Scionology” podcast looked at the research on family firms.  A new working paper (abstract; PDF) from Oriana Bandiera, Andrea Prat, and Raffaella Sadun explores how the behavior of family firm CEOs differs from that of professional CEOs, and why the former seem to perform worse. If you had to sum it up in one word: sloth. From the abstract:



A Unified Theory of Why Women Earn Less

When it comes to the year 1991, history books will undoubtedly focus on the first Gulf War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but at least domestically, the biggest change was one you probably never heard about: 1991 was the first year that women overtook men in college attainment, a trend that has only gained steam since. Today 37.2% of women between the ages of 25 to 29 have a four-year college degree or higher versus just 29.8% for men.

Yet for all the academic achievement by women, men still earn a higher wage for equivalent jobs and continue to dominate the highest ranks of society. Senior management positions? Only one in five are held by women. Fortune 500 CEOs? Just 4% and fewer than 17% of the seats in Congress are held by women. 

Scholars have long theorized about the reasons why women haven’t made faster progress in breaking through the glass ceiling. Personally, we think that much of it boils down to this: men and women have different preferences for competitiveness, and at least part of the wage gaps we see are a result of men and women responding differently to incentives.



The Face of a CEO

We’ve blogged before about the influence that beauty can have on earnings and career choices. But what about the shape of a face? A new paper in the British Journal of Psychology looks at the faces of U.K. executives. Researchers Shuaa Alrajih and Jamie Ward found that CEOs have greater than average facial width-to-height ratios. The abstract:

The relative proportion of the internal features of a face (the facial width-to-height ratio, FWH) has been shown to be related to individual differences in behavior in males, specifically competitiveness and aggressiveness. In this study, we show that the Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) of the leading UK businesses have greater FWHs than age- and sex-matched controls. We demonstrate that perceivers, naive as to the nature of the stimuli, rate the faces of CEOs as higher in dominance or success, and that ratings of dominance or success are themselves correlated with the FWH ratio. We find no association with other inferred traits such as trustworthiness, attraction or aggression. The latter is surprising given previous research demonstrating a link between FWH and ratings of aggression. We speculate that the core association may be between FWH and drive for dominance or power, but this can be interpreted as aggression only in particular circumstances (e.g., when the stimuli are comprised of faces of young, as opposed to middle-aged, men).



Are University Presidents Paid Like CEOs?

The Chronicle of Higher Education just published its survey of public university presidents’ compensation, which rose 4.7 percent, with four presidents receiving more than $1 million. During that year, public university faculty salaries rose less than 2 percent, a discrepancy that replicated the previous four years. Why the difference?

Market explanations would be that these wages reflect jobs increasingly well done relative to faculty performance (increasing relative productivity) and/or increasing difficulty in attracting talent.  The first explanation is not credible: having taught at public universities for 40 years, I’ve seen the quality of public universities decline compared to private universities.  (In 1969, one could argue that 3 of the top 10 economics departments were at public universities.  Today, only 1 is.)  Nor is there a dearth of high-quality potential university presidents.



Should "TailSpotting" Be on Your Stock-Research Checklist?

From a new working paper by David Yermack, an economist at NYU/Stern, called “Tailspotting: How Disclosure, Stock Prices and Volatility Change When CEOs Fly to Their Vacation Homes” (abstract; older version in PDF):

This paper shows close connections between CEOs’ vacation schedules and corporate news disclosures.  I identify vacations by merging corporate jet flight histories with real estate records of CEOs’ property owned near leisure destinations.  Companies disclose favorable news just before CEOs leave for vacation and delay subsequent announcements until CEOs return, releasing news at an unusually high rate on the CEO’s first day back.  When CEOs are away, companies announce less news than usual and stock prices exhibit sharply lower volatility.  Volatility increases immediately when CEOs return to work.