In Search of the “Steve Jobs Effect”: How Influential Are Managers in Iranian Firms’ Decisions and Performance?

Abstract

This paper aims to estimate the influence of managers, including CEOs and members of the board, on changing the firms’ policies and performances. To this end, we first assemble a hand-collected database on the composition of the boards of directors and CEOs across 488 firms listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange and Iran Fara Bourse Co. for the period 2010-2018. We attempt to provide an overview of the characteristics of the top executives of the Iranian firms for the first time. Correspondingly, some of the findings point out an average of two-year tenure for managers in companies, the presence of the majority of the board members in only one company over our sample period, the inverse relationship between the managers’ tenure and their level of education, and low participation of women as managers Having combined these data with the data from the financial statements, we ran a set of regressions on a sample period of 2010-2016 to identify whether managers have significant effects on the firms’ behavior and performance. The results show a significant increase in the adjusted for the regressions of the firms’ performance - in contrast to the regressions of the firms’ policies - after adding managers fixed effects. Meanwhile, only a small fraction of managers have significant effects in the regressions, and for a small fraction of them the magnitude of the effects is large.

Keywords

• corporate finance
• manager-specific effects
• financial policies
• firm performance
• investment decisions
• panel data.