The bigger a CEO's signature the more likely he or she is to be a narcissist, a new study claims.

The research which compared the signatures of some 605 CEOs of US firms found that size does matter where boss's autographs are concerned.

It found that bosses with bigger signatures also tended to get the highest pay, but were in fact more likely to run their companies into the ground.

The study by academics at the Feenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina took the signatures of CEOs from company accounts filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

The authors identify narcissism as an egotistical character trait 'associated with conceit and disregard for others'.

'Similarly, narcissism creates biased self-perception in the form of upwardly biased evaluation of one’s own abilities and performance,' they say in the paper.

These qualities make them bad decision makers, the study says, but enables them to convince directors and shareholders of their competency to the extent that they get better pay.

Professor Sean Wang, one of three authors of the study, told ABC News that the 605 signatures analysed were found largely on annual reports and other documents filed by S&P 500 companies as of July 2011.

The S&P 500 index tracks the most valuable 500 companies listed on US stock markets.

Signatures were fed into a custom coded computer program which drew a rectangle around each of them and measured the area they covered.

'We standardized the measure by dividing the area by the number letters in the CEO's signature,' Professor Wang said.

Professor Wang said he and his co-authors relied on findings from previous psychological studies which claimed that bigger signatures mean bigger egos.

Using the size of the signature as a proxy for the writers' narcissism, they found that narcissistic CEOs invest more in capital expenditures and acquisitions but pay lower dividends, with overinvestments being largest in magnitude when financial slack is high.

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(Source: Dailymail)