Firms are key to economic development, and CEOs are key to firm productivity. Are firms in countries at varying stages of development led by the right CEOs, and if not, why? We develop a parsimonious measure of CEO time use that allows us to differentiate CEOs into "leaders" and "managers" in a...

We use a survey of nearly 360,000 workers conducted from May 2020 through December 2023 to characterize shifts in remote work across time, industry, occupation, and geography, and examine the evolving relationship between remote work and employee engagement. We find remarkable stability in the...

We use daily administrative data from a leading automobile manufacturer to study the organizational impacts of introducing new models to the auto assembly line. We first show that costly defects per vehicle spike when new models are introduced. As a response, the firm trains in problem-solving...

We present a mechanism based on managerial incentives through which common ownership affects product market outcomes. Firm-level variation in common ownership causes variation in managerial incentives and productivity across firms, which leads to intra-industry and intra-firm cross-market...

Subjective performance evaluation is widely used by firms and governments to provide work incentives. However, delegating evaluation power to local leadership could induce influence activities: employees might devote too much effort to impressing/pleasing their evaluator, relative to working...

In 2017, "The Big Three" institutional investors launched campaigns to increase gender diversity on corporate boards. We estimate that their campaigns led American corporations to add at least 2.5 times as many female directors in 2019 as they had in 2016. Firms increased diversity by...

Prior research, primarily based on lab experiments, suggests that females might be more averse to competition than males and could be more inclined towards collaboration, instead. Were these findings to generalize to adults across the workforce, there could be profound implications for...

Training investments are essential for improving worker and firm productivity, yet their implementation is often hindered by low participation rates and insufficient worker engagement. This study uses data from three firms--a car manufacturer, a quick-service restaurant chain, and a retail...

Full days worked at home account for 28 percent of paid workdays among Americans 20-64 years old, as of mid 2023, according to the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes. That's about four times the 2019 rate and ten times the rate in the mid-1990s that we estimate in time-use data. We...

Team incentives are important in many compensation systems that pay workers according to the output of their team as well as to their own output, with team bonuses often depending on whether the team meets or exceeds specified thresholds. Yet little is known about how team members with different...