Understanding the Rise in CEO Age

Yves here. I have to confess that I had no idea that the average age of CEOs had risen in nearly all countries and in companies both small and large. This article does a fine job of documenting the phenomenon but is not as good on possible explanations. Readers may do better than their and my ideas. One could be less ageism in upper class cohorts, particularly in light of improved health among the aged and plastic surgery. Second could be the great shift rightward across the world, that more conservatism makes leadership by elders and less turnover at the top more attractive.

By Valentin Kecht, PhD Student Universität Bonn; Alessandro Lizzeri, Professor of Economics Princeton University; and Farzad Saidi, Professor Universität Bonn. Originally published at VoxEU

The composition of Western workforces has shifted toward older workers, and this trend is particularly strong at the very top of business organisations. This column uses newly assembled data spanning a wide range of firms to document that average CEO age at appointment has risen sharply over recent decades. This increase is concentrated outside of large, listed firms and driven by longer, more diverse career paths prior to appointment. Demographics, schooling, and tenure cannot explain these patterns. Instead, rising uncertainty and economic complexity have increased demand for generalist human capital, prompting firms to prioritise accumulated experience over innate ability and incentivising prospective CEOs to broaden their skill portfolios in response.

Populations are ageing rapidly across Western economies, shifting the composition of the workforce toward older workers and raising concerns about long-run losses in growth and productivity (Aksoy et al. 2019, Maestas et al. 2023). Moreover, over the last decades, both the US and Europe have experienced a decline in business dynamism, with a slowdown in firm formation and productivity growth (e.g. Decker et al. 2016, Akcigit and Ates 2019, Biondi et al. 2024). Despite extensive research on these trends, surprisingly little is known about whether and how they are linked at the micro level.¹

In a recent paper (Kecht et al. 2026), we study the market for executives and document a striking pattern in newly assembled data covering a wide range of firms. Since 2000, the average age of CEOs has risen sharply in the US and in Europe, and far faster than demographic trends alone would predict. Our evidence suggests that this increase in CEO age reflects firms placing greater weight on diversified managerial experience as operating environments have become increasingly uncertain and complex. Rather than a mechanical consequence of an ageing workforce, the rise in CEO age may thus indicate an active and efficient response to evolving market conditions.

Ageing at the very top of the corporate ladder can affect firm outcomes through, for example, older CEOs’ distinct management style (Bertrand and Schoar 2003, Schoar and Zhu 2016, Dessein and Prat 2019) or preferences (Jenter and Lewellen 2015). The literature has demonstrated that CEO age is negatively associated with business dynamism and firm risk. Our findings thus speak not only to how firms respond to changing economic conditions, but also to how these decisions feed back into broader aggregate trends.

Data and Descriptive Evidence

Using data on more than 50,000 CEOs from BoardEx, we document a consistent rise in CEO age since 2000. In the US, the average CEO age increased by more than 10 years, reaching 61 in 2023 (Figure 1).² Age at appointment also rose noticeably, from under 48 to 55 years, suggesting that the ageing trend cannot be attributed solely to longer tenures, later retirement, or CEO entrenchment. Furthermore, we find that small firms are the primary drivers of this broad ageing phenomenon. While CEOs of larger, listed firms are on average older than those of smaller, private firms, the latter group has converged toward the former over the sample period (Table 1, Panel A).

Figure 1 Average CEO age over time

Notes: The plot shows the average age of CEOs over time, separately for sitting CEOs and CEOs at appointment. The sample includes 50,510 CEOs in the United States, for which we obtain information from BoardEx.
Source: Kecht et al. (2026)

Table 1 CEO characteristics at appointment for selected years

Notes: Firm size quartiles in Panel A are defined by employment and constructed separately by year; the largest quartile refers to the top quartile of the employment distribution. Panel B reports average work experience prior to first CEO appointment. External (internal) experience refers to positions held outside (inside) the appointing firm. The number of NAICS-4 industries counts distinct four-digit industries. Panel C reports the share of CEOs who switched to a lower seniority level (based on job titles) at least once prior to their first CEO appointment.
Source: Adapted from Kecht et al. (2026)

These age shifts have been paralleled by fundamental changes in how CEOs build their careers. First, most of the ageing is accounted for by an increase in external experience outside the current firm. In contrast, internal experience has remained roughly unchanged over the past decades. Second, before assuming their CEO role, individuals today have transitioned through a greater number of positions, firms, and sectors than in the past (Table 1, Panel B). Third, the time spent in each position, firm, and sector has fallen since 2000. Fourth, even internally appointed CEOs now join their firms at a higher age and seniority level. Fifth, although ageing has also occurred among lower-ranked executives, these changes are more pronounced among CEOs, suggesting that broad external experience has become an increasingly important factor in CEO selection.

Alternative Explanations

In light of the many changes in the economic environment over this period, it is worth considering a range of potential explanations for the documented age patterns. Demographics can only account for a small fraction of the trend, as CEO age has increased more than three times as fast as the average age of the labour force as a whole. Furthermore, we observe similar patterns across European countries despite widely different demographic trajectories. Moreover, measures of industry concentration are uncorrelated with CEO age at appointment, and other firm characteristics such as firm size and listing status leave the trend largely unexplained. The same holds true for CEO characteristics, including internal hiring rates, gender, and education. Finally, we demonstrate that our results are not driven by a rebound from the dot-com bust.

Demand for Generalists in the Face of Greater Uncertainty and Complexity

To interpret these patterns and formalise the role of changing market forces in shaping CEO appointments, we develop a many-to-one matching model of executives and firms. Executives vary in both age-adjusted ability (which peaks at mid-career) and experience (which increases in age), while firms differ in firm size and have multiple, hierarchically ranked positions. Our main result characterises how an increase in the value of experience shifts CEO positions to older executives, especially at smaller firms. We also show that, under mild assumptions, CEOs in smaller firms are younger on average, consistent with the patterns observed in the data.

We further scrutinise our main hypothesis empirically by assessing the impact of two potential drivers behind the rising demand for generalist CEOs: economic uncertainty and business complexity. These forces can lead firms to seek leaders with generalist skills, which are more closely tied to accumulated experience than to raw ability. As executives require longer career paths to build such diverse capabilities, firms appoint older CEOs.

We resolve endogeneity concerns by exploiting spatial variation in firms’ access to elite strategy consultants (specifically, McKinsey, BCG, and Bain (MBB)). The key idea is that in uncertain and complex environments, firms value leaders who can draw on experience across many industries and job functions. Elite consultants have gathered these generalist skills in an accelerated fashion and can, thus, act as substitutes for older, more experienced executives. As a result, the effect of rising uncertainty and complexity on CEO age should be stronger where consultants are in shorter supply.

We measure access to consultants as the flight time to the nearest MBB office, effectively leveraging variation from both office openings and air route expansions. Our analysis reveals that firms in high-uncertainty industries appoint significantly older CEOs when young generalists in the form of MBB consultants are harder to reach, with stronger effects among smaller firms where generalist human capital is more difficult to accumulate internally. We find very similar results when replacing uncertainty with measures of business complexity, including firms’ diversification across business segments and geographies as well as their exposure to trade-induced variation in economic complexity.

Supply-Side Reactions to Changing Skill Requirements

We shift focus to a potential supply-side response in the managerial labour market. One interpretation of prospective CEOs’ increased turnover across positions, firms, and industries is that they respond strategically to the increasing premium for broad managerial capabilities. To test this, we explore whether executives have become more willing to accept lower-level positions and reduced pay in the short run in exchange for building a generalist skill set that potentially enhances their long-term career prospects.

Drawing on data from the universe of LinkedIn accounts covering half a billion individuals, we document that CEOs appointed in recent years are more likely to have gone through transitions towards less senior positions. In the early 2000s, fewer than one in five CEOs had experienced such a transition; by the end of our sample, that figure had doubled to more than 40% (Table 1, Panel C).

To establish causality, we exploit the idea that executives learn about career-enhancing opportunities through professional networks and study changes in employees’ career paths after they learn about CEO appointments of former peers. Using a difference-in-differences design that leverages within-firm variation across metro areas, we document increased job mobility in response to such an information shock. On average, treated individuals are more likely to exhibit downward switches across firms and transitions across industries, translating into lower wage growth in the short run. These effects are stronger for coworkers with longer shared tenure, for those that exhibit more mobility on the way to the top, and for workers in small firms. Taken together, the evidence suggests that both the demand and supply of generalist skills have shaped the rise in CEO age.

Conclusion

Our results offer a nuanced picture of age developments in the market for executives since the early 2000s. CEO age has risen substantially and beyond demographic forces, a trend accompanied by a lengthening of executive career paths across firms, positions, and sectors. Older CEOs tend to manage firms with slower growth rates and less radical innovation, but also reduce firms’ risk exposure. Therefore, what might appear concerning for long-term economic dynamism may represent a rational response to business environments characterised by heightened uncertainty and complexity. Understanding the underlying mechanisms driving this transformation provides important insights into evolving corporate governance and the firm-level origins of aggregate fluctuations.

Looking ahead, the shift toward generalist human capital may be related to the growing demand for skills that enable coordination, adaptation, and decision-making under uncertainty. As technology, including AI, increasingly substitutes routine tasks, it may further raise the value of such skills while disrupting the pathways through which expertise has traditionally been acquired (Garicano and Rayo 2025, Garicano et al. 2026). The rising importance of generalist human capital thus reflects not only its resilience to automation, but also suggests that the patterns we document may prove persistent.

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1. One exception is d’Astous et al. (2025), who study the effect of workforce ageing on corporate investment.
2. Similarly, for a sample of 19 European economies, average CEO age has climbed from 48 to 57 years.

 

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