To innovate, employees need to develop novel ideas and coordinate with each other to turn these ideas into better products and services. Work outcomes provide signals about employees' abilities to the labor market, and therefore career concerns arise. These can both be 'good' (enhancing...

An essential ingredient in models of career concerns is ex ante uncertainty about an agent's type. This paper shows how career concerns can arise even in the absence of any such ex ante uncertainty, if the unobservable actions that an agent takes influence his future productivity. By...

Incentive theory predicts that contract terms should respond to differences in agents’ productivities. Firms’ practice of anonymous contracts thus appears puzzling. We show that such a "one-size-fits-all" approach can be reconciled with standard agency theory if careers are marked by...