Essays on the Value of CEOs and Directors

In the first paper, we investigate the value of corporate connections among top executives and directors of di˙erent firms using a natural experiment. In particular, our identification strategy rests on the idea that sudden deaths trigger unexpected and exogenous dissolu-tions of connections. This allows us to quantify the market value of each of the suddenly deceased managers’ connections by examining the stock price reactions at the firms that are aÿliated with managers from the deceased managers’ networks. While the existing lit-erature on executive connections has focused primarily on the implications of managerial networks for the employing firms, our approach examines connected firms, which enables us to quantify the value of individual connections to the deceased manager and to isolate the value of connections from factors such as the loss of key personal and other managerial characteristics.