Acceso usuarios
Jennifer Merluzzi, Damon J. Phillips
Recent scholarship on the returns to labor market specialization often claims that being specialized is advantageous for job candidates. We argue, in contrast, that a specialist discount may occur in contexts that share three features: strong institutionalized mechanisms, candidate profiles with direct investments that signal their value, and a high supply of focused candidates relative to demand. We then test whether there is a specialist discount for graduating elite MBAs, as it is a labor market that exemplifies these conditions under which we expect specialists to be penalized. Using rich data on two graduating cohorts from a top-tier U.S. business school, we show that elite MBA graduates who established a focused (specialized) market profile of experiences relating to investment banking before and during the program were less likely to receive multiple job offers and were offered less in starting-bonus compensation than similar MBA candidates with no exposure or less-focused exposure to investment banking. Our theory and findings suggest that the oft-documented specialist advantage may be overstated
