Associate professor John Bai, in the D’Amore-McKim School of Business, writing with Anya Mkrtchyan from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, uses “rich microdata” from the United States Census Bureau to examine the “relative performance” of new CEOs within a company, comparing CEOs promoted internally with those who are hired externally.

Ultimately, their findings “suggest that inside successors might benefit from adopting an outside perspective, demonstrating a sensitivity to change, and challenging legacies and relationships that might diminish their effectiveness.”

Read “What Do Outside CEOs Really Do? Evidence from Plant-Level Data” at the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance.