PhD CEOs and firm performance
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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- Euro Fin Management - 2021 - Urquhart - PhD CEOs and firm performance
Final published version, 2.17 MB, PDF document
Licence: CC BY Show licence
DOI
This paper investigates the relationship between the education of a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and firm performance and provides robust evidence that firms led by CEOs with PhDs outperform their peers. We find that CEOs with PhDs increase firm performance by 3.03% while CEOs with a PhD from a highly ranked university increase firm performance by 4.65%. Our results are robust to endogenous CEO selection, transition firms, alternative rankings, unobserved firm characteristics and the network of the CEO. We also show that the increase in firm performance is due to a tighter control of costs and superior cash flow management.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | European Financial Management |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2022 |
| Externally published | Yes |