MBAs Are More Self-Serving Than Other CEOs

The research: Danny Miller, a research professor at HEC Montreal, partnered with Xiaowei Xu, an assistant professor at the University of Rhode Island, to analyze the performance of 444 celebrated U.S. CEOs—those featured on Fortune, Forbes, and BusinessWeek covers from 1970 to 2008. Miller and Xu tracked their firms’ growth strategies and performance and the CEOs’ compensation, and found that CEOs with MBAs were more likely to engage in behavior that benefited them but hurt their companies. Specifically, they pursued costlier growth strategies and were less able to sustain superior performance than their non-MBA counterparts.