Researcher ORCID Identifier

0009-0007-2166-9909

Graduation Year

2026

Date of Submission

4-2026

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Economics

Reader 1

Yaron Raviv

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

2026 Casper Aliaga

Abstract

This paper examines whether post-transition firm performance differs by incoming Chief  Executive Officer (CEO) gender. Prior research has explored CEO succession and CEO gender  separately; however, no study directly tests whether the change in firm performance around a  leadership transition varies depending on whether the incoming CEO is female or male. If female  CEOs face a glass cliff, they may inherit struggling firms and underperform. At the same time, if  female CEOs must exceed a higher bar to reach the position, they may outperform male  counterparts. To test these forces, I use a sample of 1,633 CEO transitions from ExecuComp  spanning 2010 through 2023. Using an Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) fixed effects model with  industry and year controls, I find that incoming CEO gender has no statistically significant effect  on market-adjusted stock returns in the year following the transition. This result holds across  multiple specifications and robustness checks. A supplementary ROA analysis finds a weakly  significant negative association between female CEO appointments and post-transition  profitability, though this difference is consistent with the known limitations of accounting  measures in the CEO transition setting. Overall, my findings suggest that markets do not price  female and male CEO appointments differently, and that boards appear to select female CEOs on  criteria comparable to those applied to male CEOs.

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