A recent study by three Danish finance professors looked at whether large changes in a CEO's life had an effect on a business's performance. This is what they found out:
Profitability slid by about one-fifth, on average, in the two years after the death of a CEO's child, and by about 15% after the death of a spouse. The death of an executive's mother-in-law led to a slight rise in profitability.
So chief executives do matter to their companies' performance, unfortunately, what they do outside the boardroom matters too.
