1 Timothy Quigley and Donald Hambrick, “Has the “CEO Effect” Increased in Recent Decades? A New Explanation for the Great Rise in America’s Attention to Corporate Leaders,” Strategic Management Journal 36, no. 6 (2015): 821–830; Anthony Mayo, Nitin Nohra, and Laura Singleton, Paths to Power: How Insiders and Outsiders Shaped American Business Leadership (Cambridge, MA, 2006).

2 Craig Crossland and Donald Hambrick, “Differences in Managerial Discretion Across Countries: How Nation-Level Institutions Affect the Degree to Which CEOs Matter,” Strategic Management Journal 32, no. 8 (2011): 797–819.

3 Rocio Bonet, Peter Cappelli, and Monika Hamori, “Gender Differences in Speed of Advancement: An Empirical Examination of Top Executives in the Fortune 100 Firms,” Strategic Management Journal 41, (2020): 708–737; Maximilian Göbel, Alexander Seymer, Dominik van Aaken, “Differences between CEOs: A Social-Class Perspective on CEOs’ Industry Affiliation in Germany,” Academy of Management Discoveries 8, no. 4 (2022): 531–560.

4 Peter Cappelli, Monika Hamori, and Rocio Bonet, “Who’s Got Those Top Jobs?” Harvard Business Review 92 no. 3 (2014): 74–77.

5 Magnus Henrekson, Odd Lyssarides, and Jan Ottosson, “The Social Background of Elite Executives: The Swedish Case,” Management & Organizational History 16, no. 1 (2021): 65–87; Keetie Sluyterman and Geralda Westerhuis, “The Changing Role of CEOs in Dutch Listed Companies, 1957–2007,” Enterprise & Society 23, no. 3 (2022): 711–745; Stephanie Ginalski, “Who Runs the Firm? A Long-Term Analysis of Gender Inequality on Swiss Corporate Boards,” Enterprise & Society 22, no. 1 (2021): 183–211. Good summaries of the extant historical literature on corporate elites can be found in Walter Friedman and Richard S. Tedlow, “Statistical Portraits of American Business Elites: a Review Essay,” Business History 45, no. 4 (2003): 89–113, and Business Elites, ed. Youssef Cassis (Aldershot, Hampshire, 1994).

6 Alfred Marshall, Industry and Trade: A Study of Industrial Technique and Business Organization (London, 1919); Jim Tomlinson, “The British ‘Productivity Problem’ in the 1960s,” Past & Present 175 (2002): 188–210; Nicholas Bloom and John Van Reenen, “Measuring and Explaining Management Practices Across Firms and Countries,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 122, no. 4 (2007): 1351–1408.

7 Alfred Chandler, “The Emergence of Managerial Capitalism,” Business History Review 58, no. 4 (1984): 473–503; Shirley. P. Keeble, The Ability to Manage: A Study of British Management 1890–1990 (Manchester, 1992), chap. 2. Both Chandler and Keeble highlight the widespread use of comparisons between Britain, the United States, Germany, and Japan to explain long-run changes in economic development and the corporate economy.

8 Existing studies of British corporate elites include: Youssef Cassis, Big Business: The European Experience in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1997); Philip Stanworth and Anthony Giddens, “An Economic Elite: Company Chairmen,” in Elites and Power in British Society, ed. Philip Stanworth and Anthony Giddens (Cambridge, UK, 1974), 81–101; David Jeremy, “Anatomy of the British Business Elite, 1860–1980,” Business History 26, no. 1 (1984): 3-23. Jeremy details the collation of the Dictionary of Business Biography, which contains a selection of corporate leaders and entrepreneurs.

9 Susanna Fellman, “Prosopographic Studies of Business Leaders for Understanding Industrial and Corporate Change,” Business History 56, no. 1 (2014): 5–21.

10 Richard S. Tedlow, Kim Bettcher, and Courtney Purrington, “The Chief Executive Officer of the Large American Industrial Corporation in 1917,” Business History Review 77, no. 4 (2003): 687–701; Cyril O’Donnell, “Origins of the Corporate Executive,” Business History Review 26, no. 2 (1952): 55–72; Mark S. Mizruchi and Linroy J. Marshall, “Corporate CEOs, 1890–2015: Titans, Bureaucrats, and Saviors,” Annual Review of Sociology 42, no. 1 (2016): 143–163.

11 Frank Taussig and Carl Joslyn, American Business Leaders (New York, 1932); Peter Temin, “The Stability of the American Business Elite,” Industrial and Corporate Change 8, no. 2 (1999): 189–209.

12 Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850–1980 (New York, 1981); Alfred D. Chandler, Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, MA, 1990).

13 Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA, 1977); Cassis, Big Business; Mabel Newcomer, The Big Business Executive: The Factors That Made Him: 1900–1950 (New York, 1955); Neil Fligstein, “The Intra-Organizational Power Struggle: Rise of Finance Personnel to Top Leadership in Large Corporations, 1919–1979,” American Sociological Review 52, no. 1 (1987): 44–58; Rolv Petter Amdam, “Creating the New Executive: Postwar Executive Education and Socialization into the Managerial Elite,” Management and Organizational History 15, no. 2 (2020): 106–22.

14 Nick Tiratsoo, “Management Education in Postwar Britain,” in Management Education in Historical Perspective, ed. Lars Engwall and Vera Zamagni (Manchester, 1998); Business Elites, ed. Cassis, 162.

15 There is a wider debate on the measurement of company size, particularly in the early decades of the century, with various measures proposed as more accurate proxies of company size. These include market values, number of employees, and total assets (Christopher Schmitz, The Growth of Big Business in the United States and Western Europe, 1850–1939 (Cambridge, UK, 1993), 21). We use market capitalization because total asset totals can be manipulated (this was particularly prevalent prior to the 1948 Companies Act) and total asset totals and employee numbers are not readily available prior for most of our sample period. Market capitalization, on the other hand, is available and is consistently measured across the century.

16 Margaret Ackrill and Leslie Hannah, Barclays: The Business of Banking 1690–1996 (Cambridge, UK, 2001); Wilfred Frank Crick and John Edwin Wadsworth, A Hundred Years of Joint Stock Banking (London, 1936); Barry Supple, The Royal Exchange Assurance: A History of British Insurance 1720–1970 (Cambridge, UK, 1970); Clive Trebilcock, Phoenix Assurance and the Development of British Insurance: Volume 2, The Era of the Insurance Giants 1870-1984 (Cambridge, UK, 1985).

17 Analysis of the removed companies does not reveal the introduction of any discernible biases. The removed companies were evenly distributed across industries and across the first five decades of the database.

18 Stanworth and Giddens, “An Economic Elite,” 81–101; Cassis, Big Business.

19 Business Elites, ed. Cassis, 238.

20 Cassis, 125.

21 Tedlow et al., “The Chief Executive Officer.”

22 David W. Allison and Blyden B. Potts, “Title Wave: the Diffusion of the CEO Title Throughout the US Corporate Network,” CRSO Working Paper Series no. 576 (1999).

23 Tedlow et al., “The Chief Executive Officer,” 689.

24 Alfred D. Chandler, “The United States: Seedbed of Managerial Capitalism,” in Managerial Hierarchies: Comparative Perspectives on the Rise of the Modern Industrial Enterprise, ed. Alfred D. Chandler and Herman Daems (Cambridge, MA, 1980), 9, 35.

25 Mizruchi and Marshall, “Corporate CEOs, 1890–2015,” 145–146.

26 All figures depict time trends from a univariate nonparametric regression using local mean smoothing.

27 In figure 1, the roles managing director and chairman, and CEO and chairman, indicate individuals holding both roles concurrently at some point in their tenure, which we regard as holding dual roles.

28 Terence Gourvish, “A British Business Elite: The Chief Executive Managers of the Railway Industry, 1850–1922,” Business History Review 47, no. 3 (1973): 289–316.

29 Youssef Cassis, City Bankers, 1890–1914 (Cambridge, UK, 1994), 56–57.

30 Cassis, Big Business, 160.

31 Giddens and Stanworth, “An Economic Elite,” 81.

32 Cassis, Big Business, 158.

33 Morikawa Hidemasa, “The Increasing Power of Salaried Managers in Japan’s Large Corporations,” in Business Elites, ed. Cassis, 474–475.

34 Allison and Potts, “Title Wave,” 9.

35 Brian R. Cheffins, “Corporate Governance Since the Managerial Capitalism Era,” Business History Review 89, no. 4 (2015): 717–44.

36 Brian R. Cheffins, “The Rise of Corporate Governance in the UK: When and Why,” Current Legal Problems 68, no. 1 (2015): 387–429. In the early 1990s, corporate scandals in Britain involving large scale fraud included Polly Peck, Bank of Credit and Commerce International, and Maxwell Communication.

37 Anthony Sampson, The Essential Anatomy of Britain, Democracy in Crisis (London, 1992), 112–113.

38 Committee on the Financial Aspects of Corporate Governance, The Financial Aspects of Corporate Governance (London, 1992).

39 Mizruchi and Marshall, “Corporate CEOs, 1890–2015”; Sluyterman and Westerhuis, “The Changing Role of CEOs in Dutch Listed Companies.”

40 John Moore, “British Privatization – Taking Capitalism to the People,” Harvard Business Review 70 (1992): 115–124.

41 Office for National Statistics: Mergers and Acquisitions Survey, Value of UK Domestic Mergers and Acquisitions, 1985–2019.

42 The gray shading shows the 5 percent confidence intervals around average tenure and age.

43 William Lazonick and Mary O’Sullivan, “Maximizing Shareholder Value: A New Ideology for Corporate Governance,” Economy & Society 29, no. 1 (2000): 13–35; Quigley and Hambrick, “Has the ‘CEO Effect’ Increased in Recent Decades?”

44 Alfred Marshall, Industry and Trade: A Study of Industrial Technique and Business Organization (London, 1919); Derek H. Aldcroft, “The Entrepreneur and the British Economy, 1870–1914,” Economic History Review 17, no. 1 (1964); David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 (Cambridge, UK, 1969).

45 Wiener, English Culture; George C. Allen, The British Disease: A Short Essay on the Nature and Causes of the Nation’s Lagging Wealth (London, 1979).

46 Giddens and Stanworth, “An Economic Elite,” 89.

47 Hartmut Berghoff, “Public Schools and the Decline of the British Economy 1870–1914,” Past & Present 129, no. 1 (1990): 148–67.

48 Michael Aldous, Philip T. Fliers, and John D. Turner, “Was Marshall Right? Managerial Failure and Corporate Ownership in Edwardian Britain,” Journal of Economic History 83, no. 1 (2023): 131–65.

49 Laurence W. B. Brockliss, The University of Oxford: A History (Oxford, 2016), chap. 14.

50 Business Elites, ed. Cassis, 125–127; Mayo et al., Paths to Power, chap. 6; Shunsuke Nakaoka, “The Making of Modern Riches: The Social Origins of the Economic Elite in the Early 20th Century,” Social Science Japan Journal 9, no. 2 (2006): 221–41.

51 Business Elites, ed. Cassis, 137.

52 Meeghan Rogers, Gareth Campbell, and John Turner, “From Complementary to Competitive: The London and UK Provincial Stock Markets,” Journal of Economic History 80 (2020): 501–530.

53 Jay M. Winter, The Great War and the British People (1985; repr., Basingstoke, Hampshire, 2003), 94–99.

54 Peter Scott and James T. Walker, “The Comfortable, the Rich, and the Super-Rich. What Really Happened to Top British Incomes during the First Half of the Twentieth Century?,” Journal of Economic History 80, no. 1 (2020): 58.

55 Giddens and Stanworth, “An Economic Elite,” 101.

56 Rakesh Khurana, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession (Princeton, 2007) outlines the wider debates on professionalisation around codes, standards, and ethics.

57 James Bossard and Frederick Dewhurst, University Education for Business (Philadelphia, 1931).

58 Alfred D. Chandler, Visible Hand; Carola Frydman, “Rising Through the Ranks: The Evolution of the Market for Corporate Executives, 1936–2003,” Management Science 65, no. 11 (2019): 4951–4979; Amdam, “Creating the New Executive.”

59 Business Elites, ed. Cassis, 132–134.

60 Hidemasa, “Salaried Managers in Japan,” 480–481.

61 Keeble, The Ability to Manage, chap. 4.

62 Business Elites, ed. Cassis, 162.

63 Cassis, 136–137.

64 Mairi Maclean, Gareth Shaw, Charles Harvey, and Alan Booth, “Management Learning in Historical Perspective: Rediscovering Rowntree and the British Interwar Management Movement,” Academy of Management Learning & Education 19, no. 1 (2020): 1–20.

65 Nick Tiratsoo and Jim Tomlinson, “Exporting the ‘Gospel of Productivity’: United States Technical Assistance and British Industry 1945–1960,” Business History Review 71, no. 1 (1997): 41–81.

66 Geoff Whitty, Annette Hayton, and Sarah Tang, “Who You Know, What You Know and Knowing the Ropes: A Review of Evidence About Access to Higher Education Institutions in England,” Review of Education 3, no. 1 (2015): 29.

67 Committee on Higher Education, Higher Education: Report of the Committee Appointed by the Prime Minister under the Chairmanship of Lord Robbins, 1961–63 (London, 1963).

68 Michael Sanderson, The Universities and British Industry, 1850–1970 (London, 1972).

69 Business Elites, ed. Cassis, 137.

70 Derek Matthews, Malcolm Anderson, and John Richard Edwards, The Priesthood of Industry: The Rise of the Professional Accountant in British Management (Oxford, 1998); Christine Shaw, “Engineers in the Boardroom: Britain and France Compared,” in Management and Business in Britain and France: The Age of the Corporate Economy, 1850–1990, ed. Youssef Cassis, François Crouzet, and Terry Gourvish (Oxford, 1995).

71 Andreas Kaplan, “European Management and European Business Schools: Insights from the History of Business Schools,” European Management Journal 32, no. 4, (2014): 529–534; Tamotsu Nishizawa, “Business Education in Japan,” Business History Review 82, no. 2 (2008): 354–58.

72 Nick Tiratsoo, “‘What you Need is a Harvard’: The American Influence on British Management Education,” in Missionaries and Managers: American Influences on European Management Education, 1945–60, ed. Terry Gourvish and Nick Tiratsoo (Manchester, 1998).

73 Tiratsoo, “Management Education in Postwar Britain.”

74 Business Elites, ed. Cassis, 139.

75 Donald N. McCloskey, “Did Victorian Britain Fail?,” Economic History Review 23, no. 3 (1970); Aldous et al., “Was Marshall Right?”

76 David Edgerton, Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History (London, 2018), chap. 12.

77 Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh, and Mike Staunton, Triumph of the Optimists: 101 years of Global Investment Returns (Princeton, 2002).