To measure CEO behavior we develop a new survey tool that allows a large team of enumerators to record in a consistent and comparable way all the activities the CEO undertakes in a given day. Data are collected through daily phone calls with their personal assistant (PA), or with the CEO himself (43% of the cases). We record diaries over a week that we chose based on an arbitrary ordering of firms. We drew the sampling frame randomly from the set of firms classified in the manufacturing sector in the accounting database ORBIS, an extensive commercial data set produced by the company Bureau Van Dijk that contains company accounts for more than 200 million companies around the world. The sample covers CEOs in six of the worlds ten largest economies: Brazil, France, Germany, India, the United Kingdom and the United States. For comparability, we chose to focus on established market economies and opted for a balance between high- and middle-to-low-income countries. Of the 6,527 firms included in the screened ORBIS sample, 1,114 (17%) participated in the survey,7 of which 282 are in Brazil, 115 in France, 125 in Germany, 356 in India, 87 in the UK and 149 in the US.
