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Authority, Control, and the Distribution of Earnings

Rosen, Sherwin·1982·The Bell Journal of Economics

Abstract

The distributions of firm size, span of control, and managerial incomes are modeled as the joint outcome of market assignments of personnel to hierarchical positions. Assigning persons of superior talent to top positions increases productivity by more than the increments of their abilities because greater talent filters through the entire firm by a recursive chain of command technology. These multiplicative effects support enormous rewards for top level management in large organizations. Also, superior managers control more than proportionately larger firms. Consequently, the distributions of reward and firm size are skewed relative to the distribution of abilities.

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Metadata

Authors
Rosen, S.
Venue
The Bell Journal of Economics
Publisher
JSTOR
Published
1982
Volume
13
Issue
2
Pages
311
ISSN
0361-915X (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W1480391747
Cited by
1,202
References
0
FWCI
11.60
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Authority, Control, and the Distribution of Earnings. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2307/3003456
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Rosen, S. (1982). Authority, Control, and the Distribution of Earnings. The Bell Journal of Economics. https://doi.org/10.2307/3003456

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.