The joint entrance exam, overconfident directors and firm performance

India has held an annually administered national examination for admission into its most prestigious undergraduate engineering colleges for over 50 years (known as the Joint Entrance Exam or JEE). The odds of success in this exam are minuscule. We show that those corporate directors who, as teenagers, successfully passed the JEE, hold more directorships relative to those directors who did not enjoy similar success in their teenage years. We show a significantly positive relationship exists between firm performance and the fraction of such successful directors on a given corporate board. We also find that, when appointing a new director, those corporate boards comprised of a higher proportion of JEE-directors are more likely to appoint a JEE-successful individual. Furthermore, complex firms have larger boards and a larger fraction of JEE-directors. A significantly higher proportion of complex firms, when appointing new directors, appoint JEE-directors, relative to the other firms. We believe that the JEE-directors are an overconfident group (fueled by spectacular success early in life) and it is intrinsic overconfidence that propels them to make decisions on corporate boards that translates into superior firm performance.