Spanish CEO’s personal traits as intermittent influencers during economic expansion and recession periods

Spanish Chief Executive Officer’s personality traits are measured by two psychometric tests (LOT-R and DOSPERT) in order to monitor its influence on corporate financial decisions during economic expansion and recession periods.The research examined the data from both the Spanish firm CEOs’ personal traits and the economic financial situation of certain firms. In order to obtain these data, firstly we determined the set of necessary previous conditions required to the selected firm: the business ownership, the firm size (large) and the continuity of the CEO in the company during the two economic periods. Secondly, we define the population of companies from the database SABI which is a source of economic and financial information of Spanish and Portuguese firms. The number of firms which met the former requirements were 1,020 where we excluded the financial firms whose balance sheets had a structure different from non-financial companies. From the population, a simple random sample of 720 firms. The economic and financial data correspond to the period from 2001 to 2014. This sample period is divided into two subperiods: from 2001 to 2007, a period of economic expansion, and from 2008 to 2014 or the economic recession period.