Do boards learn to hire? The effect of board experience with CEO replacement on CEO performance

Research Summary We examined whether or not directors' prior experiences with Chief Executive Officer (CEO) selection helps them to choose a higher‐performing CEO. Using S&P 1500 firms from 1999 to 2020, we found that boards' prior experiences with hiring CEOs do not improve their ability to choose a higher‐performing CEO; rather, their prior CEO selection experience has a small but consistent negative effect. At the same time, we found little evidence that the domain specificity of prior CEO succession experience impacts the performance of subsequently hired CEOs. Overall, we suggest that our pattern of results is suggestive of superstitious learning by directors. Managerial Summary Our findings suggest that boards with more experience hiring new CEOs tend to select CEOs who exhibit slightly lower performance. This finding is an important addition to recent research in this area that theoretically and empirically demonstrates why and how boards may find it difficult to be effective. The economic magnitude of our findings is relatively small, however. It does not appear that more experience with hiring CEOs is associated with boards making dramatically worse CEO selections. Instead, the magnitude of our findings suggests that greater experience with hiring CEOs leads boards to select new CEOs who perform slightly worse and that this negative effect persists when we consider domain specificity (e.g., the context of prior hiring experience).