This thesis presents three essays on industrial organization and political economy. In the first essay, I show how the attributes of a managerial workforce affect firms' placement decisions and wage offers, and managers' quit decisions. My OLG model features two division managers and a CEO, where each executive may be at a different point in his employment horizon. The firm takes into account the attributes of "all" executives and decides: which manager to promote to CEO, which manager(s) to lay off, and what wage offers to make to different executives; while managers who were not laid off decide whether to stay at the firm or to quit and take an outside employment offer. I analyze how the decisions of the firm and managers vary according to the age-skill profiles of the firm's executives. In the second essay, I develop a dynamic, 2-party citizen-candidate model in which candidates are distinguished by both their ideology and their valence. I provide sufficient conditions under which the median voter is decisive and there exists a unique symmetric, stage-undominated, stationary perfect Bayesian equilibrium. In equilibrium, I prove that higher valence incumbents compromise more, compromise to more extreme policies, and are re-elected more. I find that the effect of valence on expected policies "varies" across incumbents with different seniority. This novel result might partially explain the conflicting findings in the empirical literature and theoretical single-election models. I expand the model to allow interest groups to search to identify candidates with higher valence and provide conditions under which the equilibrium expected policy choice of office holders is more extreme when interest groups have more extreme ideologies, reducing welfare of all voters. In the third essay, I study the role of parties in a citizen-candidate repeated-elections model in which voters have incomplete information. This paper identifies a novel "party competition effect" in a setting with two opposing parties. Compared with "at large" selection of candidates, party selection makes office-holders more willing to avoid extreme ideological stands, and this benefits voters of all ideologies. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]