Overeducated workers are more productive and have higher wages in comparison to their adequately educated coworkers in the same jobs. However, they face a series of challenges in the labor market, including lower wages in comparison to their similarly educated peers who are in correctly matched...

We find that companies dramatically raise their incumbent executives' pay, especially equity-based pay, after losing executives to other firms. The pay raise is larger when incumbent executives have greater employment mobility in the labor market, when companies lose senior executives, and when...

We study whether accounting information quality (AIQ) is priced in the executive labor market. Focusing on externally hired CEO compensation at their initial appointment, we find a 7.38% pay premium for a one-standard deviation decline in AIQ measured in the years preceding the appointment. This...

We analyze the impact of social comparison on optimal contract design under imperfect labor market competition for managerial talent. Adding a disutility of social comparison as induced by a ranking of verifiable efforts to the multi-task model by Bénabou and Tirole (2016), we demonstrate that...

Using hand-collected data on CEO appointments during shareholder activism campaigns, this study examines whether shareholder involvement in CEO recruiting affects frictions in CEO hiring decisions. The results indicate that appointments of CEOs who are recruited with shareholder activist...

Career mobility theory suggests that given a certain occupation, schooling improves upward mobility in terms of promotion and wage growth. We are the first to test the implications of this theory for over- and under-education by means of direct information about promotions to managerial...