Data on departure reasons in US CEO turnover over 1992-2019
Description
We present a dataset created from merged secondary sources of ExecuComp and CompuStat and then augmented with manual data collection through searches of news stories related to CEO turnover. We start dataset construction with the ExecuComp executive-level data for the period from 1992 through 2020. These data are merged with the CompuStat dataset of financial variables. We clean and process the data to ensure that relevant financial information is available for the firms and executives in the dataset. As the dataset is intended for research on CEO turnover, we exclude observations in which the CEO at the start of the fiscal year is not well-defined; these are cases when there were co-CEOs and cases when the CEO was shared across different firms. The data set also excludes firm/year combinations that involve a restructuring of the firm – spinoff, buyout, merger, or bankruptcy. We identify the CEO at the start of each year for each firm. This also helps identify the last year an individual served as CEO. In order to identify CEO turnover based on changes in the CEO from year to year, we require firm observations to extend over at least six contiguous years for the firm to remain in the sample. Cases involving the last year the firm is in the sample are excluded. We also exclude from the dataset cases when there was an interim CEO who stayed in the position for less than 2 years. This results in a sample of 3,100 firms reflecting 41,773 firm/year combinations. For this sample, we examine news articles related to CEO turnover to confirm the reasons for each CEO departure case. We use the ProQuest full-text news database and search for the company name, the executive name, and the departure year. We identify news articles mentioning the turnover case and then classify the explanation of each CEO departure case into one of five categories of turnover. These categories represent CEOs who resigned, were fired, retired, left due to illness or death, and those who left the position but stayed with the firm in a change of duties, respectively. The dataset consists of a single table containing the following fields: • gvkey – unique identifier for the firms retrieved from CompuStat database • firmid – unique firm identifier to distinguish distinct contiguous time periods created by breaks in a firm’s presence in the dataset • coname – company name as listed in the CompuStat database • execid – unique identifier for the executives retrieved from ExecuComp database • exec_fullname – full name of the executive as listed in the ExecuComp database • year – fiscal year • reason – reason for the eventual departure of the CEO executive from the firm, this field is blank for executives who did not leave the firm during the sample period • ceo_departure – dummy variable that equals 1 if the executive left the firm in the fiscal year, and 0 otherwise