The Survival of Mediocre Superstars in the Labor Market
研究发现，资金受限的企业倾向于雇佣有经验但能力低的工人，而非潜力更高的新手；在超级明星劳动力市场中，超过五分之一的新聘有经验工人能力低于新手平均水平，约40%的雇佣是平庸的，替换他们可提升劳动力平均能力0.1个标准差。
Abstract We argue that liquidity constrained firms face strong incentives to hire experienced, but low ability workers instead of novice workers with higher upside potential. Using four decades of high-frequency information on worker performance in a “superstar” labor market allows us to estimate the revealed ability of experienced workers at the time they are hired by a new firm. More than one-fifth of these hires are “substandard” in that the revealed ability of the hired experienced worker lies below the mean ability of recent novices. Even more hires (around 40%) are “mediocre,” as their ability falls short of the hiring threshold that maximizes the long-run average ability of the active workforce. Replacing mediocre hires by novice workers would increase the average ability of the workforce by 0.1 standard deviations..