My interests are primarily in the area sometimes known as the economics of personnel. I have recently extended my earlier interests in labour economics to cover topics such as top executive pay and corporate governance. My earlier work on labour economics in the 1980s included studies of the impact of manpower training programmes, unemployment duration, women’s working lives, discrimination, and trade union wage mark-up. The work on unemployment was joint with George Akerlof at Berkeley. George won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001. More current projects have included analyses of the effects of boardroom subcommittees such as remuneration committees and the operation of financial instruments such as executive share options in aligning incentives. Some of my earlier work in this area (with Charles O’Reilly at Stanford University) has recently enjoyed a resurgence in interest in the USA, and my working partnership with Charles continues.Recent research has focused on top executive pay and has dealt with career pay and pay simplification. Evidence submitted to the BIS Enquiry on Executive Pay and to the Kay Enquiry into Long-term Decision Making has emphasised the usefulness of Career Shares as a policy development. Research projects have been supported by the ESRC, the Nuffield Foundation and the Leverhulme Trust. TMy most recent ESRC funded project was: Paying for performance: Realized pay and performance in CEO careers, an examination of outcomes [RES-062-23-0904]. Recent work has led me to examining the careers of female board directors. This is summarised in a 2018 paper in the British Journal of Mnagement “Symbolic management and the glass cliff. Evidence from the boardroom careers of female and male directors.” Brian G M Main and Ian Gregory-Smith, British Journal of Management, Vol. 29, (January), pp.136–155, 2018.http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8551.12208/fullI currently have research links with:Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, California; Department of Economics at the University of Sheffield; George Washington University.The McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University;Specialties: top executive pay and corporate governance.Details of recent activity at: