Given that thousands of Americans have lost their jobs over the last year, it only seems fair that some CEOs get the boot, too.
And if CEOs haven't gotten fired yet, they have reason to be worried about job security.
Chief Executive Officers are more likely to get canned during a rotten market than an economic boom, according to a new study, that looked at 1,600 CEO turnovers from 1993 to 2001.
The study found that CEOs were 50 percent more likely to get axed a year or two into an industry slowdown. But the researchers -- Dirk Jenter, an assistant professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Fadi Kanaan of MIT -- found that the CEOs who got canned during a downturn tended to be deadbeat underperformers, anyway.
"When stock prices are up, managers are less likely to be fired; when stock prices are down, they are more likely to be fired," said Jenter in a Stanford GSB newsletter. "Our first results suggested that it does not matter whether a low stock price is driven by firm performance alone or broader market factors."
Photo: Flickr/Peter Kaminski
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