The paper provides empirical evidence how promotion incentives and performance pay are related to nonverifiable human capital acquisition contingent on its grade of firm specificity. Consistent with Prendergast (1993), I document that promotion incentives are positively related to nonverifiable...

This paper examines how human capital based approaches explain the distribution of earnings. It assesses traditional, quasi-experimental, and new micro-based structural models, the latter of which gets at population heterogeneity by estimating individual-specific earnings function parameters....