This paper studies the effect of CEO attributes on firms’ R&D spending in Saudi firms. Mainly, it examines the influence of CEOs’ education (level and background), CEOs’ experience (work experience, tenure and functional background), CEOs’ origin and CEOs' ownership. These attributes are among the main CEO attributes that are not considered simultaneously by previous studies. Empirically, we use a sample of 63 listed Saudi companies on Tadawul stock exchange. The study uses a panel model employing data over the period from 2016 to 2019 with 252 observations and formulates five different equations using the ordinary least square regression. Findings show that companies employing CEOs with functional backgrounds in marketing and/or engineering will invest more in R&D. Similarly, R&D spending increases when the CEO is an insider and has a part in the firm capital. These results would help scholars and shareholders to understand what makes executives more willing to initiate innovation and thus, they can select and govern well the company’s CEO.

This paper shows empirically the impact of organizational and behavioral determinants on the CEO's investment horizon choice, using artificial intelligence explanatory methods. We apply our approach to 100 Saudi firms. We test the effect of three organizational determinants: ownership concentration, board independence, and CEO remuneration system; and three behavioral determinants: myopia, the locus of control and commitment, on the CEO's investment horizon choice. The study’s key finding is that executives' commitment bias is the most important variable in terms of modal value that affects firms' long-term investment choice. We also find a positive and significant relationship between myopia and long-term investment choice, whereas the lowliest determinant of the horizon choice is the locus of control. More generally, these results show that CEOs who are likely to be the most myopic may display long-term behavior with the existence of high cognitive involvement.

This study deals with appreciating the role of both governance system and executives cognitive and attitudinal aspects in the innovation decision-making. After discussing the theoretical relationship between board independence and CEOs attitude and behavior, we are advancing an empirical model testing the correlation between the managers’ attitude and behavior towards innovation and his psychological commitment level. The CEOs commitment bias and attitude constituent were measured using questionnaire. The data analysis was performed using the Bayesian network method on 220 Tunisian executives. Empirical results confirm the theoretical prediction and shows that processing with persuasive mechanism does not have an effective role on the alignment of the manager’s attitude and behavior in key tasks such innovation decision. CEOs authentic behavior was more related to an important manager involvement in this behavior rather than to persuasive effort committed by outside directors to make him contract this action. CEOs attitude and behavior towards innovation are shown related to commitment link “manager-task” and suggests that the board of directors plays no role in the CEOs discretion management. We argue that persuasive approach is not a sufficient path in behavior and interests alignment; yet, it should be applied with the commitment approach for understanding manager decision-making.