CEO Narcissism, Management Team Characteristics, and Corporate Credit Risk

ABSTRACT We investigate whether and how CEO narcissism affects corporate credit risk, measured by bond yield spreads. Using 12,826 US corporate bond observations from 2008 to 2023 for this investigation, we find that CEO narcissism is significantly and positively associated with corporate credit risk through heightened asset value volatility and greater financial leverage. In addition, we explore new mechanisms related to management team characteristics, focusing on both CEO‐ and team‐level traits. Specifically, the positive association between CEO narcissism and corporate credit risk is more pronounced when the top management team has more shared working experience and when the CEO has a broader social network. These executive traits strengthen the CEO's risk‐taking incentives, thereby amplifying the effect of CEO narcissism on bondholders. Moreover, subordinate executives’ relative power weakens the CEO narcissism effect because of the internal monitoring function, whereas CEO ownership intensifies the effect due to the debt–equity conflict mechanism. Our results are robust after addressing endogeneity, controlling for CEO overconfidence, and employing alternative measures of CEO narcissism and firm credit risk.