This study investigates the effects on initial public offering (IPO) outcomes of the existence and type of financial expertise of chief executive officers (CEOs) and chief financial officers (CFOs) serving on their own IPO firms' boards. For brevity we refer to these executives as executive...

We find that accounting charges for goodwill impairment, which imply a deterioration in the capabilities of acquired assets to generate expected cash flows, provide useful indicators of CEO underperformance. We examine 5,990 firms that completed acquisitions and investigate the relation between...