This paper introduces new nonparametric statistical methods to evaluate zero-cost investment strategies. We focus on directional trading strategies, risk-adjusted returns, and the investor's decisions under uncertainty as the core of our analysis. By relying on classification tools with a long...

Using a randomized experiment with an automobile manufacturing firm in China, we measure the effects of letting workers evaluate their managers on worker and firm outcomes. In the treatment teams, workers evaluate their supervisors monthly. We find that providing feedback leads to significant...

The Truckers and Turnover Project is a statistical case study of a single firm and its employees which matches proprietary personnel and operational data to new data collected by the researchers to create a two-year panel study of a large subset of new hires. The project's most distinctive...

Improving public sector workforce quality is challenging in sectors such as education where worker productivity is difficult to assess and manager incentives are muted by political and bureaucratic constraints. In this paper, we study how providing improved information to principals about...

When an employee expects repeated evaluation and performance incentives over time, the potential future rewards create an incentive to invest in building relevant skills. Because new skills benefit job performance, the effects of an evaluation program can persist after the rewards end or even...

We examine the changing relationship between unionization and wage inequality in Canada and the United States. Our study is motivated by profound recent changes in the composition of the unionized workforce. Historically, union jobs were concentrated among low-skilled men in private sector...

This paper provides evidence that the personalities of policymakers matter for policy. Three results support the relevance of personalities for policy. First, doctors with higher Big Five and Perry Public Sector Motivation scores attend work more and falsify inspection reports less. Second,...

We study the impact of government-led incentive systems by examining a staggered reform in the Chinese state-owned enterprise (SOE) performance evaluation policy. To improve capital allocative efficiency, in 2010, regulators switched from using return on equity (ROE) to economic value added...

We examine the performance of the offshore hedge fund industry over the period 1989 through 1995 using a database that includes defunct as well as currently operating funds. The industry is characterized by high attrition rates of funds and little evidence of differential manager skill. We...