Does Self-promotion on Social Media Boost Career? Evidence from the Market for Executives

Our paper studies the impact of reputation management on executives career using the evidence from their usage of Twitter. This self-promoting behavior has both a direct influence of the barging powers in negotiating compensation and sorting in the hiring process, which helps an executive to increase the chance of finding a job. Our structural model based on a Two-Sided Matching model is able to exploit the characteristics of the other candidates to separately identify influence in barging power and sorting in getting a job. We model the assignment of executives to firms and the pay as endogenously determined. Both effects are found to be significant but in different ways. While self-promotion increases CEO compensation, in the recruiting process, only past very unsatisfactory CEO candidates benefit from reputation management. The results show more salient positive assortative matching of reputation management in Chief Marketing Officer market than the CEO market.