Just read another interesting piece of research: http://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mnsc.2014.1926
The authors found that single CEOs tend to be more risk taking and pursue more aggressive investment policies. This marital status effect, however, is weaker among older managers. This is an important identification because if we believe that marriage and risk taking are both driven by a common personality trait, then people who are single should continue to be risk taking when they grow older. This is not the case here.
The authors have also used another clever trick to rule out the alternative hypothesis that the finding was due to innate characteristics of the person. What they have done is to use the divorce laws across states (the study was conducted in the USA) as an instrument. The idea, in layman terms, is that divorce cost should affect a person's inclination to get married, but the establishment of the divorce laws should have little to do with the innate traits of the persons. So, the divorce laws can be used to prune the (what we call "endogenous") variations due to other unknown variations in the data, such as personality traits or intrinsic risk preferences due to race, gender, etc. After this kind of "correction", we should be fairly confident that the difference in risk attitude is really due to marital status itself.
So, why would a married CEO be less aggressive? There are many possible explanations. It could be family commitment, the relatively higher cost of leisure time, aggregation of family preferences (which tends to regress the risk attitude toward the average), or even, biological, as marriage may affect a person's testosterone level.
The only pity I find in this study is that the authors have not attempted to validate some of these explanations. Nevertheless, it is a good illustration of an interesting business study that uses a clever way to address a challenging research problem. Some may say that the finding seems trivial. However, we should all grow the habit to challenge the trivial thoughts. What seems trivial in our every day life are often wrong -- having an independent inquisitive mindset is important.
