This paper studies how career concerns affect an agent's choice between a risky and a safe project when the risky project's return depends on its quality and the agent's ability. If the agent does not know her ability, career concerns lead to underinvestment in the risky project, which...

Holmstrom's (1982/99) career concerns model has become a workhorse for analyzing agency issues in many fields. The underlying signal jamming argument requires players to use information in a Bayesian way, which is difficult to directly test with field data: typically little is known about the...