Just right

HOW many wives should a male chief executive have? (From a shareholder’s perspective, not the boss’s first wife’s.) Two is a good number, reckons Jon Moulton of Better Capital, a private-equity firm. (Maybe a boss with alimony to pay must work harder.) But three is too many. Getting divorced too often may be a sign of an unstable character.Mr Moulton speaks from experience. (He has always lost money backing thrice-divorced managers, apparently.) Others use more rigorous methods to draw lessons from how bosses behave.Marriage is a surprisingly good predictor of management style, reckon Nikolai Roussanov and Pavel Savor of Wharton Business School. The average unmarried boss invests 69% more than his married counterpart, they find. But his swashbuckling can be costly: the returns he generates are more volatile. This “single” effect is strongest among young bosses, unsurprisingly.Other researchers track the travel habits of chief executives. David Yermack of Stern Business School uses corporate-jet flight data and holiday-home records to reconstruct 230 holidays of big-company...