The breadth premium: measuring the firm-level impact of CEO career breadth

Battle Count: 80

The paper has minimal direct relevance to quantitative trading. It examines CEO career characteristics and their association with long-term firm stock performance (36-month horizon), which is more aligned with fundamental analysis and corporate governance research. The abnormal return methodology (market-adjusted, peer-adjusted, momentum-adjusted) uses standard event-study techniques common in finance, but the paper does not develop trading signals, portfolio strategies, or short-term predictive models. The CEO breadth factor could theoretically be incorporated into a fundamental factor model for long-horizon equity selection, but no such application is explored.

The methodology involves: (1) collecting and coding CEO resume data from multiple public sources, (2) constructing a multi-dimensional breadth index using custom taxonomies (NAICS-based functional domains, Digital Commons Disciplines Taxonomy), (3) computing abnormal returns against three benchmarks, (4) running OLS regressions with fixed effects and clustered standard errors, and (5) conducting propensity score matching. The data collection and coding pipeline is labor-intensive and subjective, while the statistical methods themselves are standard econometrics. The main complexity lies in data quality assurance and the breadth index construction.

Results and Discussion sections are marked 'UNDER REVISION'. The dataset is explicitly stated as 'under validation'. Earlier results were withdrawn and the database rebuilt. No code, data, or actual empirical findings are presented. The paper is a preprint (V0.4) with no final results published. Reproducibility is essentially impossible at this stage.