Role of educational, regional and religious attributes of CEOs in performance of Indian family firms

Abstract

Purpose

The authors investigate whether community-based CEO's attributes, particularly educational attainment, regional and religious affiliation, are direct antecedents of performance in family-controlled Indian firms. The authors further examine whether CEO's education moderates the linkage of firm performance with regional and religious affiliation.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors employ pooled Ordinary Least Square with fixed effects and Fama-Macbeth regression techniques to test their hypotheses.

Findings

The results reveal that firms with post-graduate CEOs in business and firms with doctorate CEOs, significantly outperform peer firms. The authors also find that CEOs from northern India outperform peer CEOs consistently which emanates from the risk-taking differentials of CEO's across regions. Hindu CEOs also deliver superior return on assets. However, CEO's educational attainment moderates the influence of regional and religious affiliations.

Originality/value

This study is unique as it contributes on the role of regional affiliation of top executives in determining performance which almost remains unexplored in existing literature.

Citation

DasGupta, R. and Pathak, R. (2022), "Role of educational, regional and religious attributes of CEOs in performance of Indian family firms", International Journal of Managerial Finance, Vol. 18 No. 5, pp. 997-1027. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJMF-06-2021-0268