Essays on Markets for CEOs and Financial Analysts

This thesis contains three essays study markets for two types of agents in the financial market, CEOs and financial analysts.
The first essay focuses on a particular kind of CEO succession that involving a lame duck CEO. We evaluate the firm's performance around the succession period and provide possible explanations for the observed performance pattern.
The second essay tries to understand the positive correlation between new CEOs' incentive pay and firms' performance change. More specifically, it distinguishes (i) the selection effect that better CEOs are matched with firms provide higher incentive pay and (ii) the incentive effect that CEOs receive higher incentive pay are better motivated.
The third essay investigates the positive impact of brokerage houses’ reputation on financial analysts' forecasting accuracy. By using a matching model and a Markov Chain Monte Carlo method, it distinguishes the relative importance of (i) the influence effect that more reputable brokerage houses provide more resources to help their analysts make better forecasts and (ii) the selection effect that more reputable brokerage houses attract better analysts.