Recent studies have indicated that older Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) tend to be more capable, ethical, and risk-averse as compared to their younger counterparts. Keeping this in mind, we use a unique hand-collected data on corporate lawsuits to examine whether CEO age influences corporate litigation. After controlling for several important variables and employing several estimation techniques, we find that firms with older CEOs face fewer lawsuits. The results continue to hold when we decompose lawsuits into securities and non-securities lawsuits. Decomposing the sample firms into high-tech and labor-intensive firms, we find the negative relationship between CEO age and corporate litigation to be more pronounced in labor-intensive firms. Our results are especially relevant in the post-SOX regulation period suggesting that older CEOs enforce regulations and reduce litigation risks for their firms. Overall, our results uncover an important channel through which firms can mitigate corporate litigation, namely older CEOs.

最近的研究表明，与年轻的同行相比，年长的首席执行官 (CEO) 往往更有能力、更道德、更规避风险。牢记这一点，我们使用独特的手工收集的公司诉讼数据来研究 CEO 年龄是否影响公司诉讼。在控制了几个重要变量并采用了多种估计技术后，我们发现 CEO 年长的公司面临的诉讼较少。当我们将诉讼分解为证券和非证券诉讼时，结果仍然成立。将样本企业分解为高科技和劳动密集型企业，我们发现 CEO 年龄与公司诉讼之间的负相关关系在劳动密集型企业中更为明显。我们的结果在后 SOX 监管时期尤其重要，这表明年长的 CEO 会执行监管并降低其公司的诉讼风险。总体而言，我们的结果揭示了一个重要的渠道，公司可以通过该渠道减轻公司诉讼，即年长的 CEO。