A well-documented human tendency is to compare outcomes with others, trying to outperform them. These tendencies vary across cultures and among different individuals in a given society. To understand the implications of such diversity in status considerations on wages, contracts, sorting, and...

Individual managers are the real actors, who shape market outcome through key decisions they take on behalf of firms. Their individual payoffs are determined by the internal incentive contracts of the firm, rather than the incentives originated purely in the marketplace. This paper explores the...

We develop a model in which the heterogeneous firms in an industry choose their modes of organization and the location of their subsidiaries or suppliers. We assume that the principals of a firm are constrained in the nature of the contracts they can write with suppliers or employees. Our main...

The recent seminal work of Gabaix (2011) raises a puzzling question: If centralization-putting different projects under the same roof-reduces diversification for investors, how does this situation reconcile with the seemingly contradictory fact that it also boosts a firm's borrowing capacity? To...

Using the pay gap between a firm’s CEO and the highest-paid CEO among similar competing firms to conceptualize the prize of winning external promotion tournaments, we document a positive relationship between external tournament incentives (ETIs) and IPO underpricing – a proxy of the cost of...

We present robust evidence that firms enlarge the executive pay gap when executive mobility is constrained by the enhanced enforceability of non-compete agreements. We interpret this finding as evidence that firms increase tournament incentives to keep executives incentivized after the loss of...