Date of Completion
2022
Document Type
Honors College Thesis
Department
Grossman School of Business
Thesis Type
Honors College
First Advisor
Andrew Prevost
Keywords
facial attractiveness, beauty premium, company performance, company risk, CEO
Abstract
My thesis seeks to explore the associations between CEO facial attractiveness and company financial characteristics including risk and performance. My work builds on prior research regarding attractiveness, overconfidence, CEO compensation, and company performance to contextualize these associations. Prior research suggests that attractive people are treated differently throughout their lives, which results in different behaviors—namely overconfidence. Overconfident CEOs have been found to significantly increase the riskiness of their companies. I hypothesize that attractive CEOs tend to be more overconfident than less-attractive CEOs, which correlates to risk-taking and weaker company performance. Using an online AI-based model, I measure the facial attractiveness of CEOs from half of the firms listed in the S&P 500 and create regression models to test the statistical significance of facial attractiveness against accounting performance, financial, compensation, and risk-taking variables. The data support my hypothesis to an extent, but further experimental research is needed to determine the causality of CEO facial attractiveness.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Anderson, Sean W., "Attractive Investments: The Impact of CEO Facial Attractiveness on Risky Corporate Policies and Company Risk" (2022). UVM Honors College Senior Theses. 446.
https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/hcoltheses/446