CEO Career Horizon, Corporate Governance, and Real Options: The Role of Economic Short-Termism

By combining real options theory and studies on economic short- termism, we propose that, depending on CEOs’ career horizons, CEOs will have heterogeneous interest and incentive to make real options investments. Compared to CEOs with longer career horizons, we argue that CEOs with shorter career horizons will be less inclined to make real options investments because they may not fully reap the rewards during their tenure. In addition, we argue that long-term incentives and institutional ownership will mitigate the relationship between CEOs’ career horizons and real options investments. US public firms from 1995 to 2012 as an empirical setting produced consistent evidence for our predictions. Our study is the first to theoretically explain and empirically show that a CEO’s self-seeking behavior will impact decisions regarding real options investments.