Top-Down Influence? Predicting CEO Personality and Risk Impact from Speech Transcripts

Anonymous

Abstract: How much does a CEO’s personality influence the performance of their company? Past literature has contested the possibility of predicting the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) from purely textual data. However, we use Transformers to create the first supervised model to regress the MBTI personality of CEOs. We show that moderate to strong predictions can be obtained for three out of four MBTI dimensions. Finally, providing empirical evidence for the upper echelons theory, we demonstrate that the predicted CEO personalities have explanatory power of financial risk.