This paper provides a formal analysis of how managerial investment incentives are affected by alternative allocation rules when managerial compensation is based on accounting measures of income that include allocations for investment expenditures. The main result is that there exists a unique allocation rule that always induces the manager to choose the efficient investment level. The income measure created by this allocation rule is usually referred to as residual income or economic value added.

This paper provides structural estimates of a dynamic model of schooling, work, and occupational choice decisions based on eleven years of observations on a sample of young men from the 1979 youth cohort of the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience (NLSY). The authors find that a suitably extended human capital investment model can in fact do an excellent job of fitting observed data on school attendance, work, occupational choices, and wages in the NLSY data on young men and also produces reasonable forecasts of future work decisions and wage patterns.