Do General Managerial Skills Spur Innovation?
By Cláudia Custódio, Miguel A. Ferreira, Pedro Matos. Management Sciences, 2017
478 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We show that firms with chief executive officers (CEOs) who gain general managerial skills over their lifetime work experience produce more patents. We address the potential endogenous CEO-firm matching bias using firm-CEO fixed-effects and variation in the enforceability of non-compete agreements across states and over time during the CEO’s career. Our findings suggest that generalist CEOs spur innovation because they have skills that can be applied elsewhere should innovation projects fail. We conclude that an efficient labor market for executives can promote corporate innovation by providing a mechanism of tolerance for failure.
Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0aebde47b562dc3fb02a9295b2b0ce5febc0dec7
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Accounting
- Rongli Yuan
- Mingxiang Li
- Wen Wen
- Xiaofeng Zhao
- Pankaj C. Patel
- Alfredo De Massis
- Thomas M. Zellweger
- Luis R. Gómez-Mejía
In Economics and Econometrics
- Rongli Yuan
- Mingxiang Li
- Shuyu Xue
- Wen Wen
- Bohui Zhang
- Xiaofeng Zhao
- Pankaj C. Patel
- Alfredo De Massis
Citations in the corpus
- Managerial foreign experience and corporate innovation (2018, background): “These characteristics include managerial ability (Chen et al., 2015), managerial incentives (Lin et al., 2011), CEO overconfidence (Hirshleifer et al., 2012), CEO turnover (Bereskin and Hsu, 2014), and CEO’s general skills (Custódio et al., 2017).”
- Brain drain: The impact of air pollution on firm performance (2020, result): “In line with this view, Custódio et al. (2017) find that CEOs with general skills have better external job opportunities and thus a greater tolerance for failure than CEOs with specific skills.”
- Jack of all, master of all? CEO generalist experience and firm performance (2019, methodology): “In addition to experience, the general ability index is associated with innovation (Custódio et al., 2017), stock volatility (Pan, Wang, & Weisbach, 2015), and financial policies (Custódio & Metzger, 2014).”