Abstract

Weinvestigate whether top managers affect the performance of large public sectororganizations. As our case study we examine CEOs of English publichospitals, which are large, complex organizations with multi-million turnover.We study the impact of individual CEOs on a wide set of measures of hospitalperformance, intermediate operational outcomes and inputs. We adopt twoeconometric approaches: a parametric approach that exploits the movementof CEOs across different hospitals and a non-parametricdifference-in-difference matching estimator. Overall, we find littleevidence that individual CEOs have an impact on a large set of measures ofhospital performance. This result is not due to the allocation of goodperformers to poorly performing hospitals.