Do MBAs Make Better CEOs?

If an MBA should prepare students for anything, it’s running a company well. Plenty of research, however, claims that it doesn’t. But new research calls those findings into question, suggesting that MBAs are significantly less likely to be among the most ineffective corporate leaders.

The research is from Chief Executive magazine and Applied Finance Group, a Chicago equity research and valuation firm. Using a complex proprietary methodology, AFG measured the degree to which companies in the S&P 500 are making money in excess of their risk-adjusted capital costs. The result was a list of 359 CEOs who had been in that position for at least three years—a corporate “naughty and nice” list. If you don’t care for AFG’s methodology, it’s worth noting that the 50 companies at the top of the list had total shareholder returns that averaged 93.5 percent from January 2009 through June 2012; the 50 at the bottom averaged total returns of -21.1 percent.