In May, 2023, Professor Liu Feng, Director of Accounting Development Research Center of Xiamen University/Department of Accounting of School of Management (correspondent), Dr. Zhang Linlin from School of Economics and Management of Beijing Jiaotong University and Professor Quan Xiaofeng from Soochow Business School of Soochow University collaborated on a topic entitled "Adapted to ‘Category’? Investment choice under the evaluation of career prospects of state-owned enterprise ", published in Economics (Quarterly).

Labor market research is usually divided into external labor market research and internal labor market research. The external labor market often refers to a matching mechanism in which professional agents obtain more fair market-oriented salary pricing and better career development opportunities through headhunting inquiries, job-hopping, etc. Correspondingly, the internal labor market refers to a way for agents to achieve career development through internal promotions.

Most of the existing professional literature focuses on the economic behavior of CEOs or independent directors, fund managers, analysts and other groups in the external labor market driven by market reputation or professional age. Moreover, in developed countries, the CEO position has reached the top of the corporate hierarchy, and there is no possibility of promotion internally. Therefore, although there is relatively rich research on career focus incentives based on job promotion, there is still a lack of attention to the internal labor market. China's state-owned enterprises have a unique internal labor market formed by the multi-level management system of state-owned assets and the cadre management system, which provides research possibilities for this.

General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out: "The key to governing the country lies first in employing people. After 2014, the reform of mixed ownership and the classification and supervision of state-owned enterprises has been continuously promoted, how to build a modern enterprise system? How to adjust the incentive rules for the appointment and dismissal of senior executives of state-owned enterprises? How to innovate the personnel management system of state-owned enterprises? How to cure the typical agency behavior of state-owned enterprises? It is still a difficult and painful point for the micro-level reform of state-owned enterprises. This paper will focus on the investment choices of SOE executives in different career prospects to straighten out the institutional logic.

In order to enrich the practical inspiration of the research, this paper proposes "precise incentives due to 'class'", where the "class" not only considers the differences in strategic attributes, functional positioning and industry characteristics at the level of state-owned enterprises, but also considers the differences at the level of senior executives of state-owned enterprises, including the source, social identity characteristics, and employment methods of senior executives of state-owned enterprises. This helps to adjust the incentive policies of different types of SOE executives and achieve the matching of company characteristics and talent incentive models. Based on the above, this paper models the promotion expectations, tenure expectations and investment behaviors of SOE executives, analyzes the relationship between executive promotion expectations, investment level and investment methods, and the relationship between expected tenure reverse adjustment promotion expectations and SOE executives' investment decisions. The results of this paper enrich the relevant research of the internal labor market, and also provide more possibilities for the formulation of incentive policies for executives of state-owned enterprises.