In standard promotion tournaments, contestants are ranked based on their output or productivity. We argue that workers’ career progression may also depend on their relative rankings in dimensions a priori unrelated to their job performance, such as visibility or in-person presence. Such...

Standard models of promotion tournaments assume that firms can commit to arbitrary tournament prizes. In this paper, a firm's ability to adjust tournament prizes is constrained by the outside labor market, through the wages other firms are willing to offer to the promoted and unpromoted workers....

This paper studies the effect of increased competition in the product market on managerial incentives. I propose a simple model of career concerns where firms are willing to pay for managerial talent to reduce production costs, but also to subtract talented CEOs from competitors. This second...

Does leave-taking matter for young workers' careers? If so, why? We propose the competition effect - relative leave status of workers affecting their relative standing inside the firm - as a new explanation. Exploiting a policy reform that exogenously assigned four-week paid paternity leave to...

In standard promotion tournaments, contestants are ranked based on their output or productivity. We argue that workers' career progression may also depend on their relative rankings in dimensions a priori unrelated to their job performance, such as visibility or in-person presence. Such implicit...

We introduce career concerns into rank-order tournaments and offer a novel explanation for the pervasiveness of multiple prizes. We argue that career-concerned individuals, already facing market pressure to perform, will be reluctant to participate in winner-take-all competitions. To entice them...

Men are generally found to be more willing to compete than women and there is growing evidence that willingness to compete is a predictor of individual and gender differences in career decisions and labor market outcomes. However, most existing evidence comes from the top of the education and...

We assess the predictive power of two measures of competitiveness for education and labor market outcomes using a large, representative survey panel. The first is incentivized and is an online adaptation of the laboratory-based Niederle-Vesterlund measure. The second is an unincentivized survey...