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Cited by 676

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 25 of the 25 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Superstar CEOs*

Open access
Malmendier, Ulrike, Tate, Geoffrey·2009·Quarterly Journal of Economics

Abstract

Compensation, status, and press coverage of managers in the United States follow a highly skewed distribution: a small number of “superstars” enjoy the bulk of the rewards. We evaluate the impact of CEOs achieving superstar status on the performance of their firms, using prestigious business awards to measure shocks to CEO status. We find that award-winning CEOs subsequently underperform, both relative to their prior performance and relative to a matched sample of non-winning CEOs. At the same time, they extract more compensation following the awards, both in absolute amounts and relative to other top executives in their firms. They also spend more time on public and private activities outside their companies, such as assuming board seats or writing books. The incidence of earnings management increases after winning awards. The effects are strongest in firms with weak corporate governance. Our results suggest that the ex post consequences of media-induced superstar status for shareholders are negative.

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Crossref · 10.1162/qjec.2009.124.4.1593

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Metadata

Authors
Malmendier, U., & Tate, G.
Venue
Quarterly Journal of Economics
Published
2009-11
Volume
124
Issue
4
Pages
1593-1638
ISSN
  • 0033-5533 (ISSN-L)
  • 1531-4650
OpenAlex
W4240193059
Cited by
676
References
25
FWCI
74.18
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
bronze

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Superstar CEOs*. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1162/qjec.2009.124.4.1593
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Malmendier, U., & Tate, G. (2009). Superstar CEOs*. Quarterly Journal of Economics. https://doi.org/10.1162/qjec.2009.124.4.1593

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.