TY - JOUR AU - Schoar,Antoinette AU - Zuo,Luo TI - Shaped by Booms and Busts: How the Economy Impacts CEO Careers and Management Styles JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 17590 PY - 2011 Y2 - November 2011 DO - 10.3386/w17590 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17590 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17590.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Antoinette Schoar MIT Sloan School of Management 100 Main Street, E62-638 Cambridge, MA 02142 Tel: 617/253-3763 Fax: 617/258-6855 E-Mail: aschoar@mit.edu Luo Zuo Johnson Graduate School of Management Cornell University 114 East Avenue 349 Sage Hall Ithaca, NY 14853 E-Mail: luozuo@cornell.edu M2 - featured in NBER digest on 2012-03-01 AB - We show that economic conditions when managers enter the labor market have long-run effects on their career paths and managerial styles. Managers who began their careers during recessions become CEOs more quickly, but at smaller firms. They also have more conservative styles, such as lower investment in capital expenditures and research and development, more cost cutting, and lower leverage and working capital needs. These recession effects appear to be largely driven by the characteristics of the CEO’s first job (recession CEOs tend to start in smaller or private firms), which suggests that the early work environment is important to the formation and selection of managers. ER -