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Then you have to admit that measuring correlation between "smarter CEOs" and "shareholder value" is impossible and measure correlation between "CEO SAT scores" and "shareholder value" instead. Yeah, not that click-baity, but that would be a real study, unlike this one.

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if you have a correlation between A and B, and a correlation between B and C, then A and C are correlated.

This is not true in general.

Consider two independent fair die rolls, with A and C being the outcomes. Let B be the sum of the outcomes. The higher A is, the higher B is likely to be, so A and B are positively correlated. So are B and C. However there is no correlation between A and C as they are independent.

Oh. True, thanks for the explanation :)

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