The billionaires of the world attract significant attention from the media and the public. The popular press is full of books selling formulas on how to become rich. Surprisingly, only a limited number of studies have explored empirically the determinants of extraordinary wealth. Using a large...

This paper argues that the “superstar” phenomenon, as a natural outcome of features of knowledge-based products, has important relevance for - and has so far been overlooked by - endogenous growth theory. By modelling superstar phenomena as outcomes of winnertake-all contests in an...

This paper investigates the effect of Oscar nominations and awards on movies’ financial success by estimating the impact on weekly returns and on movies’ survival time. Our findings suggest that nominations for Oscars generate substantial extra revenues, while winning an award contributes...

To examine the impact of globalization on managerial compensation, we consider a matching model where a number of firms compete both in the product market and in the managerial market. We show that globalization, i.e. the simultaneous integration of product markets and managerial pools, leads to...