Prior research demonstrates product market advantages of organizational status but largely neglects factor market advantages. We propose that status is advantageous in labor markets because individuals generally consider employer status a nonpecuniary employment benefit. Dyadic analyses of lateral partner hiring by large U.S. law firms demonstrate two status-based advantages in employee hiring and retention. First, high-status firms are more likely than low-status ones to hire an employee from a more profitable competitor. Second, high-status firms are most likely to lose an employee to a lower-status competitor when the competitor is—atypically—more profitable. We discuss implications of these findings for individual and organizational status attainment and for the stability of industry status hierarchies.

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W e examine variation in intraprofessional status changes for employees displaced by organizational failure. We propose that failure-related reductions in bargaining power are moderated by individual status characteristics that influence potential employers' evaluations of job candidates and, therefore, individuals' status loss risks. Treating a prominent law firm's failure as a quasi-experiment, we test our arguments by analyzing 224 firm partners' transitions to subsequent employers. Most partners regained employment at firms of lower status than the failed firm. But, independent of their demonstrated productivity, a partner's likelihood of status loss increased with tenure in the failed firm's partnership and decreased with educational prestige. These results suggest not only that organizational failure can diminish cumulative career advantages but also that status characteristics that enable attainment, such as education, can protect individuals against status loss.

This paper theorizes about constraints on brokers' control benefits. I propose that brokers prefer to represent high-quality actors and that the value an actor places on representation is inversely related to the actor's perceived quality. But matching of more reputable brokers with higher-quality actors should mitigate these quality constraints. Empirical analyses of 1,028 venture capital funds raised by 745 firms from 2001 to 2006 support the theory. The likelihood that a firm's venture fund is represented by a placement agent first increases and then decreases with firm quality, measured as size, experience, and status. Neither those that value representation most (i.e., funds of low perceived quality) nor those that placement agents would most like to represent (i.e., funds of high perceived quality) are most likely to be represented by a placement agent. Results also show that more reputable placement agents represent funds raised by higher-quality firms, which indicates that a broker's reputation mitigates constraints on the control benefits of brokerage.

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