Eve, here. To be honest, I had no idea that the average age of CEOs in companies large and small is increasing in almost every country. This article does a good job of documenting the phenomenon, but it’s not so great about possible explanations. Readers may come up with better results than their or my ideas. Age discrimination among the upper class may be reduced, especially considering improved health and plastic surgery among older people. Second, a major shift to the right may be occurring around the world. In other words, increasing conservatism increases senior leadership and reduces turnover at the top, making it more attractive.
Written by Valentin Kecht, PhD Student, University of Bonn, and Alessandro Rizzeri, Professor of Economics, Princeton University. Mr. Farzad Saidi, Professor at the University of Bonn. Originally published on VoxEU
The composition of the workforce in Europe and the United States is shifting toward older people, and this trend is particularly strong at the top of corporate organizations. This column uses newly collected data across a wide range of companies to document that the average age of CEOs at appointment has risen sharply in recent decades. This increase is concentrated outside large publicly traded companies and is driven by longer and more diverse career paths prior to appointment. Demographics, schooling, and tenure alone cannot explain these patterns. Rather, rising uncertainty and economic complexity are increasing the demand for generalist human capital, leading companies to prioritize accumulated experience over innate abilities, and encouraging future CEOs to expand their skill portfolios accordingly.
Populations are aging rapidly across Western countries, shifting the composition of the workforce toward older people and raising concerns about long-term losses in growth and productivity (Aksoy et al. 2019, Maestas et al. 2023). Furthermore, over the past several decades, both the United States and European countries have experienced a decline in business dynamism due to slowing 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 related at the micro level. 1
A recent paper (Kecht et al. 2026) studies the executive market and documents striking patterns in newly collected data covering a wide range of companies. Since 2000, the average age of CEOs in the United States and Europe has risen rapidly, much faster than would be predicted by demographics alone. Our evidence suggests that this increase in CEO age reflects that firms place greater value on diverse managerial experience as operating environments become increasingly uncertain and complex. Therefore, increasing CEO age may represent a proactive and efficient response to evolving market conditions rather than a mechanical consequence of an aging workforce.
The aging of a firm’s top echelons can affect firm performance, for example, through the unique management styles (Bertrand and Schoar 2003, Schoar and Zhu 2016, Dessein and Prat 2019) and preferences (Jenter and Lewellen 2015) of older CEOs. The literature has established that CEO age is negatively related to business dynamism and firm risk. Our findings therefore speak not only to how companies are responding to changing economic conditions, but also to how these decisions feed back into broader aggregate trends.
Data and descriptive evidence
Using data from over 50,000 CEOs from BoardEx, we document a consistent increase in CEO age since 2000. The average age of CEOs in the United States has increased by more than 10 years, reaching 61 years in 2023 (Figure 1). 2 Age at appointment has also increased significantly, from under 48 to 55, suggesting that the aging trend is not solely due to longer tenures, post-retirement, or CEO retention. Furthermore, we found that small businesses are the main drivers of this widespread aging phenomenon. CEOs of large public companies are older on average than CEOs of small private companies, but the latter group converges toward the former over the sample period (Table 1, Panel A).
Figure 1 Trends in the average age of CEOs
Note: This plot shows the average age of CEOs over time, separated by incumbent and new CEOs. The sample includes 50,510 CEOs in the United States and obtains information from BoardEx.
Source: Kecht et al. (2026)
Table 1 Characteristics of CEOs at time of appointment in selected years
Note: Firm size quartiles in Panel A are defined by employment and constructed separately for each year. The highest quartile refers to the top quartile of the employment distribution. Panel B reports average job experience before the first CEO appointment. External (internal) experience refers to a position external (internal) to the appointing company. The NAICS-4 industry count counts individual 4-digit industries. Panel C reports the proportion of CEOs who switched to a lower seniority level (based on job title) at least once before their first CEO appointment.
Source: Adapted from Kecht et al. (2026)
These age changes are occurring in tandem with fundamental changes in the way CEOs build their careers. First, aging is mostly explained by increased external experience outside the current company. In contrast, internal experience has remained largely unchanged over the past several decades. Second, today’s individuals have moved through more positions, companies, and sectors before assuming the CEO role than ever before (Table 1, Panel B). Third, the amount of time spent in each role, company, and department has decreased since 2000. Fourth, even internally appointed CEOs now join the company at a higher age and seniority level. Fifth, although aging is occurring among lower-level executives, these changes are more pronounced among CEOs, suggesting that extensive outside experience is an increasingly important factor in CEO selection.
another explanation
Given the many changes in the economic environment over this period, it is worth considering various potential explanations for the documented age patterns. Demographics account for only part of this trend, as the age of CEOs is increasing more than three times faster than the average age of the entire workforce. Moreover, similar patterns are observed across European countries, despite very different demographic trajectories. Furthermore, industry concentration measures are uncorrelated with CEO age at appointment, and other firm characteristics such as firm size and listing status also leave this trend largely unexplained. The same holds true for CEO characteristics such as internal hiring rates, gender, and educational background. Finally, we demonstrate that our results were not driven by the backlash of the dot-com bust.
Demand for generalists in the face of increasing uncertainty and complexity
To interpret these patterns and formalize the role of changing market forces in determining CEO appointment decisions, we develop a many-to-one matching model of executives and firms. Executives vary in both age-related ability (peaking mid-career) and experience (increasing with age), but they vary in company size and have multiple hierarchically ranked positions. Our main results characterize how increasing experience shifts CEO positions toward older executives, especially in small and medium-sized firms. We also show that under moderate assumptions, CEOs of small firms are on average younger, consistent with the pattern observed in the data.
We further empirically scrutinize our main hypothesis by assessing the impact of two potential factors behind the growing demand for generalist CEOs: economic uncertainty and business complexity. These influences lead companies to seek leaders with generalist skills, which are more closely related to accumulated experience than raw ability. Companies appoint older CEOs because executives need longer career paths to build such diverse capabilities.
We address endogeneity concerns by exploiting spatial differences in firms’ access to elite strategy consultants (specifically McKinsey, BCG, and Bain (MBB)). The key idea is that in uncertain and complex environments, companies value leaders who can draw on experience across many industries and functions. Elite consultants are gathering these generalist skills at an accelerating rate and can serve as replacements for older, more experienced executives. As a result, increased uncertainty and complexity should have a stronger effect on CEO age in regions where the supply of consultants is in short supply.
We measure access to consultants as flight time to the nearest MBB office, effectively taking advantage of fluctuations due to both office openings and air expansion. Our analysis reveals that firms in high-uncertainty industries appoint significantly older CEOs when it is difficult to attract young generalists, such as MBB consultants, and that the effect is stronger for smaller firms, where it is more difficult to accumulate generalist human capital in-house. Replacing uncertainty with measures of business complexity (e.g., a firm’s diversification across business segments or regions, its exposure to fluctuations in economic complexity due to trade) yields very similar results.
Supply-side reaction to changing skill requirements
We shift our focus to potential supply-side reactions in the managerial labor market. One interpretation of the increase in prospective CEO turnover across roles, firms, and industries is that it is a strategic response to the increased premium for broad managerial capabilities. To test this, we investigate whether executives have become more willing to accept junior positions and pay cuts in the short term, instead of building generalist skill sets that may improve their long-term career prospects.
Based on data from a world of LinkedIn accounts covering 500 million individuals, we document that CEOs appointed in recent years are more likely to have experienced a transition to a less senior position. In the early 2000s, less than one in five CEOs made such a transition. By the end of the sample, that number had doubled to more than 40% (Table 1, Panel C).
To establish causality, we exploit the idea that managers learn about career advancement opportunities through professional networks and study changes in employees’ career paths after learning of a former colleague’s CEO appointment. We document increases in job mobility in response to such information shocks using a difference-in-differences design that exploits within-firm variation across metropolitan areas. On average, those treated are more likely to exhibit firm-wide downward shifts and industry-wide shifts, leading to lower wage growth in the short term. These effects are stronger for co-workers who have been with the company for longer, those who are more mobile in their rise to the top, and employees of small and medium-sized businesses. Taken together, this evidence suggests that both the demand and supply of generalist skills shape the increase in CEO age.
conclusion
Our results provide a nuanced picture of age trends in the executive market since the early 2000s. The age of CEOs is increasing significantly beyond demographic trends, and this trend is accompanied by longer career paths for executives across companies, roles, and sectors. Older CEOs tend to run firms with lower growth rates and less innovation, but they also reduce firm risk. Concerns for long-term economic dynamism may therefore represent a rational response to a business environment characterized by increased uncertainty and complexity. Understanding the underlying mechanisms driving this transformation provides important insights into evolving corporate governance and the sources of aggregate firm-level change.
In the future, the shift to generalist human capital is likely to be associated with an increased demand for skills that enable coordination, adaptation, and decision-making under uncertainty. As technologies, including AI, increasingly replace routine tasks, such skills will become even more valuable while potentially disrupting traditional pathways to acquiring expertise (Garicano and Rayo 2025, Garicano et al. 2026). The growing importance of generalist human capital therefore not only reflects its resilience to automation, but also suggests that the patterns we document may prove durable.
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One exception is d’Astous et al. (2025) study the impact of workforce aging on corporate investment. Similarly, in a sample of 19 European countries, the average age of CEOs has increased from 48 to 57 years.
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