Are CEOs' attitudes and beliefs linked to their firms' innovative performance? This paper uses Malmendier and Tate's measure of over-confidence, based on CEO stock-option exercise, to study the relationship between a CEO's revealed beliefs about future performance and standard measures of...

Innovation is the principle driver of firm and economic growth. Thus one disturbing trend that may explain stagnant growth is a 65% decline in firms' RQ. We propose that the rise of outside CEOs is partially responsible for the decline. While this proposition was motivated by interviews with...

Using a novel, manually-collected dataset, we find that firms whose chief executive officer (CEO) is an inventor experience significantly better innovation outcomes, as measured by patents and future citations. We obtain these results in models with firm fixed effects, in...

We examine the role of award-winning CEOs in corporate innovative activities. We find no significant difference in innovation outputs between firms of media award-winning CEOs and a matched sample of predicted winners. However, firms headed by winners of non-media awards generate significantly...

We find evidence that chief executive officers' (CEOs') hobby of flying airplanes is associated with significantly better innovation outcomes, measured by patents and citations, greater innovation effectiveness, and more diverse and original patents. We rule out alternative explanations, leading...