In this paper, we examine whether credit rating agencies consider a CEO’s general skills as a credit risk factor when assessing an entity’s overall creditworthiness and find that generalist CEOs are associated with lower credit ratings. The findings suggest that the presence of generalist...

A recent trend is that firms prefer to hire generalist CEOs with transferable skills (across firms or industries) over hiring specialist CEOs, but the consequences of this trend are unclear. In this study, we examine whether credit rating agencies consider a CEO’s general skills as a credit...

We analyze the consequences of a firm hiring a generalist CEO in terms of the audit fees paid by the firm. We find that audit fees of clients with generalist CEOs are higher than those of clients with specialist CEOs. This relation is robust to considering managerial ability, other CEO...