| dc.description.abstract | This study aims to investigate whether CEO heterogeneous characteristics
influence a company’s performance and shape its corporate behavior. The focus is
on non-listed Norwegian firms and such observable characteristics as CEO’s
gender, age, tenure, and ownership. The study closely follows the approach
undertaken by Bertrand and Schoar (2003). We find that the external validity of
their results holds as manager fixed effects are statistically and economically
significant after controlling for firm and year fixed effects as well as time-varying
firm characteristics. We also find that, on average, longer-tenured CEOs seem to be
more conservative in their decisions and older CEOs who have a higher stake in the
company appear to be positively linked to a company’s performance. We identify
that heterogeneity in decisions related to interest coverage and dividend payout ratio
is attributed to some other observable or unobservable traits than the ones analyzed
in this study. Our hypothesis that, in the case of Norwegian companies, CEO effects
should matter less for performance and influence company policies to a lesser
degree compared to US firms is refuted. We believe it might be due to the specificity
of our sample i.e., non-listed companies with high ownership concentration. | nb_NO |
