Abstract
The CEO career horizon is one of important factors influencing their strategic decision making for the firm. Building upon prospect theory and agency theory, we posit that CEOs approaching retirement will be reluctant to engage in increased diversification and more likely to initiate refocusing strategies. Moreover, we suggest that structure of control, displayed by the ratio of independent directors and CEO duality, moderates the impact of CEO career horizon such that the stronger the structure of control the lower the effect of career horizon on diversification and refocusing strategies. We test our hypotheses using a sample of firms belonging to the FTSE 100 during1997-2010. Our findings lend support to our theses.