Promotion, turnover, and discretionary human capital acquisition

This article explores human capital acquisition decisions when job placement helps determine competition for a worker. With asymmetric information, workers may invest in firm-specific capital without long-term contracts. Specific investment increases promotion chances (and hence wage competition), shifting competition back to a time when firms are symmetrically uninformed. If general human capital is the efficient (output-maximizing) investment, then an equivalent firm-specific investment maximizes expected career wages. This is a general result for sellers in second-price auctions: sellers (of labor) invest to maximize the expected second-highest bidder valuation (wage), not the winner's expected valuation.