We show that chief executive officers (CEOs) of prestigious firms earn less. Total compensation is on average 8% lower for firms listed in Fortune’s ranking of America’s most admired companies. We suggest that CEOs are willing to trade off status and career benefits from working for a publicly admired company against additional monetary compensation. Our identification strategy is based on matched sample analyses, difference-in-differences regressions, and a regression discontinuity design. We perform several robustness checks and exclude many alternative explanations, including that firm prestige just proxies for better corporate governance or for increased exposure of the pay-setting process to media attention.

Using daily advertising data, we analyze the short-term effects of advertising on investor attention and on financial market outcomes. Based on various investor attention proxies, we show that advertising positively affects attention. However, it has only little impact on turnover and liquidity. Most importantly, short-term stock returns are not significantly influenced by advertising. Further results suggest that previous findings of an economically significant positive relation between advertising and returns are due to reverse causality. Thus, the belief that stock prices can be temporarily inflated via advertising is misguided.