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While school reform literature calls attention to incentives for teachers, little research or policy making has focused on school administrators′ incentives. Career incentives perceived by a sample of elementary school principals and the influence of career background on those incentives are examined. It was found, using both qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis, that principals perceive their career as having economic, ancillary and task‐related rewards. However, principals varied in the kinds of incentives they preferred and the nature of their future goals. Principals who have moved among several school districts in their administrative careers are more likely to be satisfied and to emphasise incentives, such as contact with school constituencies, which come from staying in the principalship. In contrast, principals who have remained in the same district throughout their administrative careers are more likely to prefer those incentives which advancement to central office can offer.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of career concerns on CEOs’ use of expectations management to meet or beat analysts’ quarterly earnings forecasts. The authors posit that early career-stage CEOs are less (more) likely to use expectations management than are late career-stage CEOs if the market views expectations management as an opportunistic strategy (efficient process) due to reputational capital concerns.

The authors obtain data for CEO career stages and CEO compensation from ExecuComp, analyst earnings forecasts from the detailed I/B/E/S database, financial statement data from quarterly Compustat and stock returns from the daily CRSP database over the period 1992–2013.

The results are consistent with the opportunistic hypothesis and early-stage CEOs seeking to build reputational capital by avoiding the perception of engaging in an inefficient managerial strategy. The authors find robust evidence that late career-stage CEOs are more likely to engage in expectations management than early career-stage CEOs. Furthermore, the authors show that late career-stage CEOs tend to employ expectations management to boost the value of their equity-based compensation.

The findings have important implications because the authors document a different implication of the “horizon problem” related to CEOs’ opportunistic forecasting behavior and the manipulation of analysts’ forecasts for CEOs who are approaching retirement.

The results have practical implications for analysts who provide earnings forecasts for firms whose CEOs are in early or late career stages and for investors who use such analysts’ forecasts in firm valuation models.

The authors contribute to the literature on expectations management by documenting how reputational incentives of CEOs affect the likelihood that managers engage in expectations management. The authors show that an important managerial incentive to engage in expectations management is CEO career concerns. Furthermore, the authors show that CEOs who are in early stages of their careers choose not to engage in expectations management due to the market’s perceived degree of opportunism pertaining to this strategy.

This paper analyzes the careers of 230 professional judges in the German labor court system. Judges who are promoted early for the first time – “fast starters” – are more likely to be promoted for the second time. Fast starters, however, do not achieve a second promotion earlier – there is no evidence of a fast career track. Furthermore, judges who publish scientific books or papers are more likely to be promoted for the second time. Hence, careers neither are random nor do they follow bureaucratic criteria such as seniority. They can be understood as the outcome of a succession of tournaments for promotion that sustains career prospects both for “fast starters” and for “late bloomers”. Implications for judicial incentives and the quality of matching of judges with judicial offices are inferred.

This study aims to examine the effect of several types of ex post idiosyncratic deals (i-deals) on work–life balance and work well-being, focusing on the mediating effect of work–life balance on the relationship between ex post i-deals and work well-being as well as the moderating effect of gender on the relationship between ex post i-deals and work–life balance in the hospitality industry.

This study uses a questionnaire survey of 642 hotel managers from developed cities in China and analyze the data with structural equation modeling. This study also conducts on-site interviews among 20 hotel managers to support conclusions of the survey.

The results indicate that task i-deals as well as career and incentives i-deals significantly promote work–life balance, thereby indirectly improving work well-being. However, the impact of flexibility i-deals on work–life balance and work well-being is insignificant. The influence of career and incentives i-deals on work–life balance for males is slightly stronger than that for females.

This study has practical implications for hotel employers in terms of using various ex post i-deals to motivate and retain hotel managers by improving personal work–life balance and work well-being.

As one of early attempts to highlight the potential of i-deals to serve as solutions for work–life conflicts and unhappiness issues among hotel managers, this study provides novel insights into the mediating process between ex post i-deals and work well-being from the work–life balance perspective as well as distinct influences of various ex post i-deals on work–life balance for male and female managers.

This paper aims to explore the relationship between the readability of sustainability reports and chief executive officer (CEO) attributes, comprising monetary, non-monetary incentives and personal characteristics.

The study is based on an international sample of companies operating in sustainability-sensitive industries during 2016–2018.

The results prove that CEO monetary incentives, as well as CEO non-monetary incentives, negatively influence the readability of sustainability reports, revealed in a positive relationship with readability indexes, by providing reports with greater reading difficulty. Additionally, this study shows evidence about the relation of complementarity between these incentives. Other CEO characteristics have no significant effect on the readability of sustainability reports.

This research sheds the light on the role of CEO incentives in obfuscating sustainability information to portray the company, operating in sustainability-sensitive industries, in a favorable image.

This paper aims to investigate how different types of idiosyncratic deals (i-deals) in the hospitality industry enhance occupational well-being (OWB) through organization-based self-esteem (OBSE).

In 2019, 679 questionnaires were distributed to middle- and high-level managerial staff who had worked in high-end hotels in China for at least 1 year, and 642 valid responses were collected. The survey data were analyzed using structural equation modeling. Follow-up interviews were conducted with 20 hotel managers to verify and lend additional support to the survey findings.

Both task i-deals and career and incentives i-deals positively affected OBSE and OWB, whereas flexibility i-deals negatively affected OBSE. OBSE positively affected OWB, thereby mediating the relationships between the three types of i-deals and OWB.

This study is groundbreaking in its exploration of how various i-deals contribute to OWB through OBSE among middle- and high-level managerial staff. The findings provide initial evidence of the links between i deals, OBSE and OWB and demonstrate how i-deals can address the practical problem of the shortage and loss of competent operational and administrative talent in the hospitality industry.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the motivation behind mutual funds’ risk shifting behavior by examining its impact on fund performance, while jointly considering fund managers’ compensation incentives and career concerns.

The study uses a sample of US actively managed equity funds over the period 1980-2010. A fund’s risk shifting is estimated as the difference between the fund’s intended portfolio risk in the second half of the year and the realized portfolio risk in the first half of the year. Using the state of the market to identify the dominating type of incentive that fund managers face, we examine the relationship between performance and risk shifting in a cross-sectional regression setting, using the Fama and MacBeth (1973) methodology.

The authors find that poorly performing (well performing) funds are likely to increase (decrease) their risk level in bull markets, while reducing (increasing) it during bear markets. Furthermore, we find that funds that increase risk underperform, while those that decrease their portfolio risk do not. In addition, we find that poorly performing funds that increase (or decrease) their risk underperform across bull and bear markets, while well performing funds that reduce risk during bull markets subsequently outperform.

The paper contributes to the literature on mutual fund risk shifting by providing evidence that the performance consequence of such behavior is dependent on the state of the market and on the funds’ past performance. The results suggest that loser funds tend to be agency prone or be managed by managers with inferior investment skill, and that winner funds exhibit superior investment ability during bull markets. The authors argue that both the agency and investment ability hypotheses are driving fund managers’ risk shifting behavior.

The main objective of this research is to identify the most important human resource management (HRM) practices, which have the potential to enhance labour productivity using fuzzy synthetic evaluation approach.

The study used a mixed-methods research design in which qualitative data were collected and analysed during Phase I and quantitative data were analysed during Phase II. Nineteen experts who have experience in building construction projects were involved in interviews conducted in Phase I. During Phase II, quantitative data were collected from contractors that were involved in the delivery of building projects using questionnaires and the data were analysed using FSE technique.

Clear delegation of responsibility, stability of organisational structure and crew composition are found to be the three most important HRM practices that can enhance productivity in building construction projects. The findings of the study showed that the overall importance index computed using the FSE model is 3.65 (≈ 4) with an equivalent linguistic term of “very important”. The study also suggested that the top three HRM practices should be implemented conjointly as there is no significant difference among their weights.

The output of this research can provide important information regarding the HRM practices in the Australian construction industry. Thus, international developers or contractors who want to do construction business in Australia can implement the essential HRM practices so that the productivity of their construction projects will not be affected negatively.

There has been a recent surge of interest in open source software development, which involves developers at many different locations and organizations sharing code to develop and refine programs. To an economist, the behavior of individual programmers and commercial companies engaged in open source projects is initially startling. This paper makes a preliminary exploration of the economics of open source software. We highlight the extent to which labor economics, especially the literature on career concerns’, can explain many of these projects’ features. Aspects of the future of open source development process, however, remain somewhat difficult to predict with off-the-shelf’ economic models.