We examine the CEO’s discretionary role in the succession process by considering a critical yet overlooked phenomenon—CEO retirement. We challenge the “quiet life assumption” in career horizon literature and posit that late-career-stage CEOs who are resistant to retirement may take strategic acquisitions to prolong their incumbency. We test our predictions in the setting of Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs), where executives must follow the National Statutory Retirement Age rules. An event history analysis on a sample of all Chinese state-controlled publicly listed companies from 2003 to 2019 confirms that acquisitions a focal firm initiated are negatively associated with the subsequent likelihood of the incumbent CEO's retirement. Furthermore, the negative relationship is strengthened when the acquisitions have greater complexities, such as cross-border acquisitions over domestic acquisitions, or public-listed over private-held targets. By addressing the question of whether and when the normal CEO retirement events do not occur, our study captures the heterogeneity of psychological states of late-career-stage executives, sheds light on the CEO succession, and career horizon literature, and provides a new lens of firm acquisitions.
