The effect on mortality of having a Chief Executive Officer position: An analysis of Swedish data from 1997-2009

Abstract: In this thesis, data on 203 702 CEOs in Sweden from the time period 1997 to 2009 is combined with death data and company information to compare CEOs' mortality between different groups. This study compares survival analysis results using Cox, Gompertz and GEE-logistic parametric models. The Logrank test is used to compare the survival curves between the groups obtained by the Kaplan-Meier method. Firstly, results show that CEOs have a significantly lower mortality in ages 40-69 compared to board members. Secondly, results show that CEOs for big companies have a significantly lower mortality than CEOs in small companies. Thirdly, the industry comparisons show that CEOs of service companies and finance companies have a higher mortality compared to manufacturing companies and other companies, respectively. In the parametric models, a gender variable is used as covariate to account for mortality differences established in previous research. This paper seems to be the first in Sweden to examine a CEO effect on mortality.