We investigate executive employment gaps (hereafter, gaps) between the appointment of an external CEO at a public firm and the individual's prior executive position at a public company. These gaps cannot be reliably obtained from common databases. We hand-collect data for externally hired CEOs at public companies from 1992 to 2014. These CEOs represent approximately 40% of the 5,095 CEO successions and have a mean gap of 1.9 years. The gap increases to 3.2 years for the subset of new hires with a gap. We hypothesize that labor market frictions and executive skill sets contribute to the existence and length of these gaps. Using theories from labor economics, we predict (equilibrium) associations between two measures of "fit" (executive

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