CEO Overconfidence and Innovation

Are the attitudes and beliefs of chief executive officers (CEOs) linked to their firms' innovative performance? This paper uses a measure of overconfidence, based on CEO stock-option exercise, to study the relationship between a CEO's “revealed beliefs” about future performance and standard measures of corporate innovation. We begin by developing a career concern model where CEOs innovate to provide evidence of their ability. The model predicts that overconfident CEOs, who underestimate the probability of failure, are more likely to pursue innovation, and that this effect is larger in more competitive industries. We test these predictions on a panel of large publicly traded firms for the years from 1980 to…