Using dissertation research topics found in the EconLit database and large-scale algorithmic methods that identify author demographics based on names, we explore the link between race and ethnicity and fields of economic research. We find that underrepresented racial and ethnic minority (URM)...

Using the EconLit dissertation database and large-scale algorithmic methods that identify author demographics from names, we investigate the connection between the gender of economics dissertators and dissertation topics. Despite stagnation in the share of women among economics Ph.D.s in recent...

Social movements are catalysts for crucial institutional changes. To succeed, they must coordinate members' views (consensus building) and actions (mobilization). We study union leaders within Myanmar's burgeoning labor movement. Union leaders are positively selected on both personality traits...

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...

We analyze the offering, asking, and granting of help or other benefits as a three-stage game with bilateral private information between a person in need of help and a potential help-giver. Asking entails the risk of rejection, which can be painful: since unawareness of the need can no longer be...

We analyze the organization of corruption in a state agency. The dual mandate of the Democratic Republic of the Congo's traffic police agency is to manage traffic and to enforce the traffic code. We first document that, in the capital's branch, Kinshasa, traffic violation fines account for only...

What happens when employers would like to screen their employees but only observe a subset of output? We specify a model in which heterogeneous employees respond by producing more of the observed output at the expense of the unobserved output. Though this substitution distorts output in the...

Oil and gas lease negotiations provide mineral owners the opportunity to negotiate for both compensation and auxiliary clauses that may protect their health and properties. We use optical character recognition to assemble a novel dataset of compensation and specific clauses in nearly 60,000...

We examine the effect of performance monitoring in public procurement through the lens of organizational culture in a principal-agent model where the manager (principal) and buyers (agents) may have different beliefs about how much the government values efficiency. We show that the effect of...

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...