The widespread and growing use of equity-based compensation has transformed high-skilled labor from a pure labor input to a class of "human capitalists." We show that high-skilled labor earns substantial income in the form of equity claims to firms' future dividends and capital gains....

Competitive sorting models of the CEO labor market (e.g., Edmans, Gabaix and Landier (2009)) predict that differences in CEO productive abilities, or "talent", should be an important determinant of CEO pay. However, measuring CEO talent empirically represents a major challenge. In this paper, we...