This paper explores potential inefficiencies due to incomplete contracts in a dynamic career concerns context. In a firm--worker relationship, the worker performs tasks that have tradeoffs between productivity and information about the worker's ability. We focus on task choices with no private...

Adverse selection harms workers, but benefits firms able to identify talent. An informed intermediary expropriates its agents' ability by threatening to fire and expose them to undervaluation of their skill. Agents' track record gradually reduces the intermediary's information advantage. We show...

When a worker is raided, his initial employer is often better informed about his quality than the raiders. If the worker has career concerns and matching influence productivity, the initial employer can strategically disclose this information to influence incentives and matching efficiency. If...

This paper studies a principal-agent model of the relationship between an incumbent officeholder and the electorate, where the officeholder is initially uninformed about her ability. If officeholder effort and ability interact in the production function that determines performance in office,...

We propose a two-period matching model of firms and managers to argue that managerial career concerns may not guarantee assortative matching in the market for reputation. In the model, firms compete for managerial talent, and managers are concerned about their reputations. The market updates...

This study examines the effect of managers' career concerns on tax avoidance using the staggered recognition by state courts of the Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine (IDD), a trade secret protection doctrine which places greater restrictions on managers from joining or forming a rival company. We...

Are people prone to selecting occupations with highly skewed income distributions despite minuscule chances of success? Assembling a comprehensive pool of potential teenage entrants into professional tennis (a typical winner-take-all market), we construct objective measures of relative ability...

In a model where investors face uncertainty about the prevalence of skill among money managers, managers' collective performance carries information about the quality of the managerial pool. When peers perform well, investors correctly infer that even moderately-performing managers are more...

We examine training and recruitment policies in a two period model that nests two forms of production, quot;routinequot; work where ability and effort are substitutes and quot;creativequot; work where they are complements. Alternative ways of improving average ability have opposite implications...

We investigate the consequences for losing competitors following the end of a promotion tournament. We examine CEO tournaments and find that the total incentives of non-promoted executives (NPEs) are likely to decrease significantly at the end of a tournament based on evidence of their lower...