Title: CEO ability and corporate opacity

Abstract

This paper examines the effect of CEO ability on corporate opacity. High-ability CEOs may seek to create greater transparency to convey their ability to the market, while low-ability CEOs may signal-jam the market's inferences about their talent by limiting the available information. An analysis of S & P 500 firms indicates that firms with high-ability CEOs are significantly less opaque than firms with low-ability CEOs, and that corporate opacity decreases value more for firms managed by low-ability CEOs. Low-ability CEOs hiding behind opacity get away with it owing to lack of strong corporate governance, suggesting that corporate governance is critical for hiring and retaining talented CEOs, and also for preventing low-ability CEOs from exploiting corporate opacity. These findings are robust to the use of samples that are propensity score matched on firm complexity and past firm performance, and also to the use of alternative ability proxies and alternative measures of CEOs' choice of transparency.