Samuli Knüpfer serves as Professor of Ownership and Professor of Finance at Aalto University School of Business. He is also Adjunct Professor of Finance at BI Norwegian Business School. His key areas of expertise include financial decision-making, financial markets, investor behavior, and sustainable finance.
Professor Knüpfer's research regularly appears in top academic outlets, and he is a recipient of many research grants and awards. He has designed and delivered many courses and programs at all levels of business school education.
Using comprehensive data on 28 cohorts in Sweden, we analyze CEO health and its determinants and outcomes. We find CEOs are in much better health than the population and on par with other high-skill professionals. These results apply in particular to mental health and to CEOs of larger companies. We explore three mechanisms that can account for CEOs’ robust health. First, we find health predicts appointment to a CEO position. Second, the CEO position has no discernible impact on the health of its holder. Third, poor health is associated with greater CEO turnover. Here, both contemporaneous health and health at the time of appointment matter. Poor CEO health also predicts poor firm outcomes. We find a statistically significant association between mental health and corporate performance for smaller-firm CEOs, for whom a one standard deviation deterioration in mental health translates into a performance reduction of 6% relative to the mean.
Knüpfer, Samuli; Rantapuska, Elias & Sarvimäki, Matti (2022)
Social Interaction in the Family: Evidence from Investors’ Security Holdings
We use rich data on all business, economics, and engineering graduates in Sweden to study the lack of women among chief executive officers (CEOs). A comprehensive battery of graduates’ characteristics explains 40% of the gender gaps in CEO appointments and 60% among graduates with children. The explanatory power mostly comes from absences and unemployment, which are about twice as likely for women as men. These gender differences increase following childbirth, and they persist in the long run. We present and discuss potential explanations to the explained and remaining gaps. Although the large unexplained share makes it hard to pinpoint the exact reason for the gender gap in CEO appointments, the large contribution of labor market attachment to the explained share suggests work–family trade-offs are an important part of the story.
Adams, Renee Birgit; Keloharju, Matti & Knüpfer, Samuli (2018)
Are CEOs born leaders? Lessons from traits of a million individuals
What makes a successful CEO? We combine a near-exhaustive sample of male CEOs from Swedish companies with data on their cognitive and noncognitive ability and height at age 18. CEOs differ from other high-skill professions most in noncognitive ability. The median large-company CEO belongs to the top 5% of the population in the combination of the three traits. The traits have a monotonic and close to linear relation with CEO pay, but their correlations with pay, firm size, and CEO fixed effects in firm policies are relatively low. Traits appear necessary but not sufficient for making it to the top.
Knüpfer, Samuli; Rantapuska, Elias & Matti, Sarvimäki (2017)
Formative Experiences and Portfolio Choice: Evidence from the Finnish Great Depression