People with disabilities have low employment and wage levels, and some studies suggest employer discrimination is a contributing factor. Following the method of Bertrand and Mullainathan (2003), new evidence is presented from a field experiment that sent applications in response to 6,016 advertised accounting positions from well-qualified fictional applicants, with one-third of cover letters disclosing that the applicant has a spinal cord injury, one-third disclosing the presence of Asperger's Syndrome, and one-third not mentioning disability. These specific disabilities were chosen because they would not be expected to limit productivity in accounting, helping rule out productivity-based explanations for any differences in employer responses. Half of the resumes portrayed a novice accountant, and half portrayed an experienced one. The fictional applicants with disabilities received 26% fewer expressions of employer interest than those without disabilities, with little difference between the two types of disability. The disability gap was concentrated among more experienced applicants, and among private companies with fewer than 15 employees that are not covered by the ADA, although comparable state statutes cover about half of them. Comparisons above and below disability law coverage thresholds point to a possible positive effect of the ADA on employer responses to applicants with disabilities, but no clear effects of state laws. The overall pattern of findings is consistent with the idea that disability discrimination continues to impede employment prospects of people with disabilities, and more attention needs to be paid to employer behavior and the demand side of the labor market for people with disabilities.

We develop a new typology of star employees, wherein we identify three types of stars—universal stars, performance stars, and status stars—on the basis of stars’ unique combinations of task performance and external status. By classifying stars in this way and disentangling task performance and external status as unique and simultaneously important qualities underlying the distinct contributions of different types of stars, we provide a basis for more accurately identifying the full range of individuals who create exceptional value, and we offer novel insights into stars’ various influences in organizations. With this foundation, we explore how different types of stars’ distinct qualities and bases of value creation affect both the security of their star standing and their relative abilities to appropriate value. We then expand our focus to consider stars in the broader organizational contexts in which they exist, discussing the implications of stars’ distinct attributes for patterns of value creation, value capture, and value preservation associated with stars’ complementarities and redundancies with other organizational resources. Finally, we propose several lines of inquiry through which future research may leverage the proposed typology to address issues related to the management of different types of stars in the broader organizational contexts in which they are embedded.

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Building on the notion of cumulative advantage, we undertake a nuanced examination of how collaborating with a star affects attributions of credit and blame to nonstars in collaborative endeavors. Situating our inquiry in the US hedge fund industry, we hypothesize two‐way interactions predicting that collaboration with a star comanager will weaken both the positive effect of comanaged fund success and the negative effect of comanaged fund failure on nonstar managers’ professional status attainment (i.e., the status of a manager's subsequent employing firm). Specifically, we argue that the involvement of a star comanager will weaken prospective employers’ attributions for positive or negative performance to a focal nonstar manager, due to presumptions of the star's disproportionate influence in collaborative decisions. We then theorize a series of three‐way interactions specifying the roles of other signals of a nonstar manager's competence in this process. More precisely, we argue that a nonstar's performance outside the collaborative context and the status of the nonstar's current employer will weaken the dampening effect of comanaging with a star in the context of success and strengthen the favorable, blame‐reducing effect of comanaging with a star in the context of failure. Therefore, we suggest that nonstars who can signal their competence with these independent status signals will achieve greater professional status attainment than will those lacking such signals following both collaborative success and collaborative failure with a star. Our primary analyses support our hypotheses, while our supplementary analyses offer corroborative support for theorized mechanisms and evidence to address alternative explanations.

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