Promotions and Incentives in Partnerships: Evidence from Major U.S. Law Firms

Men, women, and competition: An experimental test of behavior

“…Because competition for promotions in U.S., Japanese, and Danish firms (Ferrall, 1996;Xu, 1997;Ericksson, 1999;Bognanno, 2001) has a tournament structure, gender differences in behavior under tournament incentives may explain gender disparities among top management in large corporations. These gender differences are significant.…”

Estimating a tournament model of intra-firm wage differentials

“…7 See Ferrall (1996), pp. 814-815, for an example where the form of the advancement function P s (· · ·) is explicitly derived given additional assumptions on the information structure of the game.…”

“…Recently, several papers have estimated structural models of tournament models, as is done in this paper. Ferrall (1996Ferrall ( , 1997, estimates structural models of internal labor markets within, respectively, law firms and engineering firms. 2 Zheng and Vukina (2007) estimate a rank-order tournament model using the Knoeber and Thurman (1994) data, and use the estimated structural parameters to simulate outcomes under an alternative cardinal compensation scheme.…”

Incentive effects and overcrowding in tournaments: An experimental analysis

“…Using the model, they showed that increases in the gap between the winner's and loser's rewards will increase the performance of tournament participants and that with risk-neutral homogeneous workers; tournaments induce an efficient allocation of resources. 3 Much of the empirical research on tournaments follows the framework first laid out by Lazear and Rosen and it can be usefully divided into two categories: tests of whether a particular payment scheme has a tournament structure (Gibbons and Murphy, 1990;Main et al, 1993;Chan, 1996;Ferrall, 1996;DeVany and Walls, 1997;Xu, 1997;Errickson, 1999;Bognanno, 2001) and tests of the behavior under tournament incentives.…”