Daredevils Make Bad Investors, Great CEOs

As a kid, you idolized Evel Knievel and The Fonz, suffering many a skinned knee jumping your bike over neighborhood pets and trash cans. You were a devil-may-care skateboarder and always the first one to leap from a bridge into the creek below.

Growing older, your idea of fun turned to roller coasters and bungee jumping, skydiving and paintball. You became the sort of person who relishes trips to Vegas and going all-in at high-stakes poker tables with the likes of A-Rod and Matt Damon. You drive like you live -- fast and furious -- be it in a sports car or straddling a motorcycle.

In a new research paper -- Cleared for Takeoff? CEO Personal Risk-Taking and Corporate Policies -- finance professors Matthew Cain of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business and Stephen McKeon from the University of Oregon tried to find common traits among the personalities of successful CEOs.

To do so, they identified a risky hobby that many of them share -- piloting their own aircraft. Using an FAA database, they determined which CEOs flew their own jets and whether being in control of a personal aircraft correlated to being effective corporate leaders.

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This story also appeared in Yahoo!Finance.

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