For each of these CEOs, we use publicly available sources to document the

employment history from the time she graduates from college to her employment
position as of 2005.We count the number of firms for which the CEO has worked
and use this number to measure the mobility of the CEO in the labor market

We use proxy statements, Marquis Who’s Who in Finance and Business, Forbes.com,
Hoovers.com, Reuters.com, corporate web sites, and CEO profiles published by
Spencer Stuart to chronicle a CEO’s employment history since graduation from
undergraduate college.3 From these sources, we also determine if the CEO has an
MBA. We collect the CEO turnover date for the current firm, the announcement
date of the turnover, and the reason for the turnover from newswire reports on
LexisNexis (See page 9.)

We obtain financial and accounting data from the Standard and Poor’s Compustat
database and CEO compensation data from the ExecuComp database.

A report on CEO successions (Karlsson & Neilson, 2009), however, suggests that
this is no longer the case: while up until 1989 the hiring of a CEO with prior
CEO experience represented
less than 1 percent of new CEO hires, CEOs are clearly becoming more mobile. The
findings show that between the years of 2007 and 2009 the same occurrence was
around 20 percent. This trend is a rapidly escalating one, moreover, as it is
only in the past decade that the incidence of hiring a CEO with prior CEO
experiences has represented more than 10 percent of CEO succession events in a
given year (Karlsson & Neilson, 2009).