Older and wiser: How CEOs’ time perspective influences long‐term investments in environmentally responsible technologies

Abstract

Most theories of corporate governance argue that chief executive officers (CEOs) take less risk as they near the end of their career, and therefore are less likely to make major investments. This prediction is based on decisions related to firm-specific benefits; however, it may not be generalizable to decisions that involve broad societal goals. In terms of societal investments, CEOs with a longer time perspective may be more likely, rather than less likely, to invest. In this paper, we argue that a CEO's future time perspective is fostered by shorter career horizons, longer tenures, higher organizational ownership and less short-term compensation. We test these hypotheses on 150 observations from the US investor-owned electric power generation sector over a three-year unbalanced sample (64.3% of the population). We applied random-effects generalized least squares (GLS) estimations to test our hypotheses, and found support for three out of four hypothesized relationships.