Many organizations whose core purpose is to advance a social mission pay employees below-market wages. We investigate two under-appreciated benefits of below-market pay in these social-mission organizations. In a series of experiments, we predict and find that, holding employees' outside opportunities constant, those attracted to social-mission organizations that pay below-market wages perform better individually and cooperate more effectively in teams than those attracted to social-mission organizations that pay higher wages. The individual performance effect arises because below-market pay facilitates the selection of value-congruent employees who are naturally inclined to work hard for the organizational mission. The team cooperation effect arises because employees expect team members who have selected a social-mission job that pays below market to be more value-congruent and, therefore, more cooperative than those who have selected a social-mission job that pays higher wages. Collectively, we demonstrate that in social-mission organizations, offering below-market pay can yield selection benefits.

We use hand-collected data to analyze submission-to-acceptance (STA) times in the top-tier accounting journals relative to other top-tier business journals from 1993 through 2021. We find that, vis-à-vis other business disciplines, STA times at top-tier accounting journals were shorter in the first half of our sample period and significantly longer thereafter. We also observe shorter STA times for articles with authors from more highly ranked institutions; this effect exists only in top-tier accounting journals and has increased over time. In additional analyses, we find that our primary inferences are unchanged when considering maturity of initial journal submissions, journal-level democratization, and review process improvements related to paper quality. Our results should be of interest to researchers, journal editors, reviewers, provosts, deans, and tenure and promotion committees. Data Availability: The data used in this study are available from the sources indicated herein.