TIME Magazine highlighted a new study by Sauder Professor Maurice Levi which shows that babies born in June and July are less likely to become corporate CEOs.
For the study, Levi and his co-authors collected birth-date information for the CEOs of S&P 500 companies between 1992 and 2009, and found that only 6.13 per cent of the sample was born in June and only 5.87 per cent of the sample was born in July. By comparison, people born in March and April represented 12.53 per cent and 10.67 per cent of the sample of CEOs.
“Our findings indicate that summer babies underperform in the ranks of CEOs as a result of the ‘birth-date effect,’ a phenomenon resulting from the way children are grouped by age in school,” says Prof. Levi. The study will appear in the December issue of the journal Economics Letters.
