I initially misread this to say that CEOs born in super fund sites had some sort of genetic change that caused them to be riskier due to environmental toxins.
It is about where the CEO was conceived and born. From the article's introduction:
>Our approach addresses these issues by exploiting prenatal exposure to pollution from Superfund sites as an exogenous source of variation in executive risk-taking behavior. [...] we control for a wide range of fixed effects, including firm, year, industry-year, CEO birth year, birth county, and headquarters state, ensuring that comparisons are made among otherwise similar CEOs. [...] we show that selection mechanisms in promotion can amplify behavioral traits shaped by early-life conditions, even when firms are unaware of those traits.
Personally, I think it sounds like hogwash -- "statistically significant" findings that have little bearing on reality.
More likely, those born in heavily industrial areas are more likely to have careers in industry.
Then I thought it meant managers who were in charge of divisions that created Superfund sites before being promoted to CEO made riskier decisions as CEO.
And now I'm back to "pollution babies take greater risks". Which to my surprise was a surprisingly reasonable hypothesis.