What Does CEOs' Personal Leverage Tell Us About Corporate Leverage?
Speaker
Abstract
| We find that firms behave remarkably similarly to how their CEOs behave personally when it comes to debt financing and leverage. We compile a comprehensive sample of home purchases and financings among S&P 1,500 CEOs. Debt financing in a CEO's recent home purchase is used as a revealed preference of the CEO's innate personal tolerance for leverage. We find a strong and robust positive relation between personal and corporate leverage. A one standard deviation (34 percentage points) increase in CEO personal leverage is found to be associated with 20 percent higher corporate leverage for the median large public U.S. firm. This relation is found to be significantly stronger for firms with weaker governance, suggesting that sorting and endogenous matching of CEOs and firms does not entirely explain our evidence. Our results have implications for our understanding of corporate capital structure decisions and suggest more generally that an analysis of CEOs' personalities and personal traits can convey important information about the financial policies of the firms they manage. |
| Should you be interested in meeting the seminar guest during lunch or diner, and/or before/after lunch, please do not hesitate to contact me by this Thursday. |
| Contact information: |
| Viorel Roscovan |
