ABSTRACT
We study the role of explicit and implicit incentives in a competitive labor market with no internal promotion opportunities. In the setting of National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) head football coaches, we find that compensation changes from career outcomes and increases from renegotiation are significantly greater than explicit bonuses. At the same time, we find that explicit incentives increase as implicit incentives from outside opportunities weaken. Overall, we show that the labor market provides strong implicit incentives by rewarding coaches for good performance while penalizing them with weaker employment opportunities following poor performance. Our findings demonstrate the significance of implicit incentives in the presence of a strong external labor market and suggest that the optimal use of explicit incentives is tempered by implicit incentives from the labor market.
Data Availability: Data are publicly available from the sources indicated in the paper.
