Research by CBS in the Wall Street Journal

Shareholders should be interested in the Managing Director’s family life

Should shareholders in a company be interested in whether the Managing Director has lost a child or if their mother-in-law has died? That’s what a front page story from the Wall Street Journal asks—a question that originally comes from research carried out by CBS.

From a small Danish company to a big American one

Professor Morten Bennedsen from the School of Economics and Centre for Economic Business Research at CBS is behind the research. Over a 10-year period, Morten Bennedsen measured the economic consequences in Danish companies of thousands of deaths among the Managing Directors and their closest family members.

Using this morbid technique, the researchers prove that Danish Managing Directors are very valuable to their companies and the researchers discuss to what degree it is possible to apply these results to large American companies.

The mother-in-law joke still stands

The Wall Street Journal claims, among other things, that the mother-in-law joke still stands: The only family member whose death didn’t have a negative effect on the underlying company was a mother-in-law. In fact, profitability rose a little after a mother-in-law died.

The Wall Street Journal speculates that shareholders should maybe begin to look a little more closely at the obituaries—or even start spying on the hospital admission ward?

Do you want to know more?

You can download the report “Do CEOs matter?” here or contact journalist Lonnie Høgh, if you would like to receive it by email.