Do generalist CEOs reduce corporate default risk?

We examine whether the general managerial skills of chief executive officers (CEOs) affect corporate default risk. Employing a large panel of data on US firms, we find that generalist CEOs help reduce default risk. This result is robust to using different fixed effects (i.e., firm, CEO, and industry fixed effects), propensity score matching, and a difference-in-differences analysis to address endogeneity concerns. Furthermore, a channel analysis unveils that generalist CEOs curb corporate default risk by lowering the volatility of the return on assets (ROA) and that of the stock return.