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Midair Refueling For Sensation Seeking? Pilot Ceos And Corporate Debt Contracting, Steven Freund, Tunde Kovacs, Nam H. Nguyen, Hieu V. Phan

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications and Presentations

We examine the relation between chief executive officer (CEO) sensation seeking, which captures the desire for varied, novel, and complex personal sensations and experiences, and corporate debt contracting. Using pilot certificates as a proxy for the personality trait of sensation seeking, we find that firms with pilot CEOs use longer maturity debt financing even when long-term debt is more costly than short-term debt. Our findings are robust to controlling for the endogenous matching between firms and CEOs. Our evidence indicates that CEOs with sensation-seeking personality traits prefer long-term debt financing to avoid the liquidity risk associated with short-term debt financing …