According to the study, employees with inflated, managerial-sounding titles might be missing out on overtime pay — a practice that increases sharply right around the federal pay threshold that allows companies to avoid paying for overtime. For workers, however, the loss of overtime results in 13.5% less pay than they might earn as a nonsalaried employee. But a federal threshold for avoiding overtime pay for managers — first set in 1938 — has only rarely been increased, Ozel said. In addition, the five states that have the tightest regulations around overtime pay showed no such spikes in managerial titles around the federal pay threshold. It doesn’t matter if you have a fictitious managerial title,” he said.