Leader narcissism and outward foreign direct investment: Evidence from Chinese firms

Researchers use the upper echelons theory to establish how leaders’ attributes affect firms’ outward foreign direct investment (OFDI), a proxy for foreign operations. This extant literature has largely ignored the impact of leaders’ psychological attributes, particularly, narcissism. We use a narcissism index of leaders of Chinese listed companies to examine the relationship between leader narcissism and firm-level OFDI for the period 2007-2017....