> To identify a set of executives for analysis, we start with a list of male CEOs from the Standard & Poor’s 1500 stock index analyzed by Engelberg, Gao & Parso

> To identify a set of executives for analysis, we start with a list of male CEOs from the Standard & Poor’s 1500 stock index analyzed by Engelberg, Gao & Parsons (in press). We restrict attention to only male CEOs because of the sexually dimorphic nature of voice pitch (Titze, 1994) and the poor representation of female CEOs among S&P 1500 firms (Bertrand & Hallock, 2001). > We intersect the Engelberg et al. (in press) observations with the Mayew & Venkatachalam (2012) CEO speech corpus, which is derived from publicly broadcast telephonic earnings conference calls archived in the Thomson Reuters StreetEvents database (www.streetevents.com). > The median sample CEO is 56 years old, operates a firm with $2.427 billion in assets, and is paid $3.692 million annually. > A test of mediation using the product of coefficients method for large samples following Preacher & Hayes (2008) confirms firm size mediates the effects of voice pitch (Z=3.15, p=0.002). The paper states that a lower voice is perceived (by everyone else) to be a better leader. Sounds reasonable enough, I guess. The statistics then show that the lower the voice, the better the compensation of the CEO and the larger the firm the CEO runs, with a strong correlation. This is where I scratch my head a bit. A couple of thoughts for why this may be, all guesses, really: 1) Listed companies on the S&P 1500 are mostly very mature and the CEOs may not do much of the value creation. Other people (CTO, COO, CFO, etc) might be doing most of the value creation with the CEO holding the company together. (This is in contrast to many tech companies - Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, etc - who are strategically involved in the company. It is their strategic directional leadership that they bring in that people trust, rather than how they make you feel when they talk) 2) In mature markets that aren't tech related, innovation is not a strong factor of growth, it's usually intangibles like connections, communication, convincing people, alignment, deals, etc. Having a "leader voice" can have a strong impact to get buy in from everyone, internal and external. 3) There may very well be a physiological link between a lower voice and strong leadership qualities, rather than just the perception of it, who knows? Or people who have a lower voice get innate advantages in leadership due to people trusting them more and them having an easier time because of that, kind of like a flywheel effect. 4) The statistics may be wrong. This doesn't seem to be the case with how they designed it.